Introduction to the Supplier Trading Screen

After login, you will be presented with a trading screen. A full trading screen is shown below. You may not have all these buttons.

The trading screens used in this experiment can appear rather busy at first inspection, so we will introduce it to you piece by piece.

Example of a Complete Supplier Trading Screen

Time, Date and Money

The top of the screen shows the current experimental date and the number of days to the next period (31st December). Next to this is your current cash balance. It is on this number that your cash performance payment will be calculated at the end of the experiment. It also shows your CURRENT production cost. This is the amount that will be deducted from your bank account for each unit produced, if your factory is running that day.

Information about the Market

The trading screen provides you several pieces of information about the market.

The "The Market" panel shows you the total demand for Units (that is, the sum of all committed sales by the Retailers that they have to obtain by 31st December) in the market for each year of the experiment, and also the total number of units currently existing - that is - the sum of the holdings of all retailers and all suppliers. (Note that at the end of each year the Retailers will sell some or all of their units to their customers. Thus you would expect the number of units in the market to decrease on 1st January by the amount of the target in that year.).

You are also provided information about the number of units you hold, the available MWh for conversion to units, and the total number of units in the market and the total future demand.

Thus in this example, all the retailers (together) have a target of 300 units in the first year. That is the minimum amount they will be seeking to purchase from the suppliers. (they could however purchase more, to use in the following years.)
As at this date there are 49 units, of which 30 are owned by this participant. This means that at this moment (early in the first year) there are insufficient units produced to meet the first year of demand.

You are also told the total future demand of all retailers and the total number of units in the market. Clearly if the total number of units in the market now exceeded the total future demand, then the market has become oversupplied.

As a supplier, you may also have control over if your factory is running or not. This is achieved through the following panel.

This panel is also used to convert your MWh holding to Units. Units must be created before they can be sold.

To stop production (and hence to stop being charged a production costs) press Stop. To restart, press this button again.

When you have read the above, please proceed to the next page.

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Last Modified: 18 October 2007