This type of population is equivalent to a ``blind'' auction, where
the agents only see the price and the good, but are prevented from
seeing who the seller (or buyer) was. As expected, we found that an
equilibrium price
is reached as long as all the sellers are
providing the same quality. Otherwise, if the sellers offer different
quality goods, the price fluctuates as the buyers try to find the best
price to buy at and the sellers try to find the
price the buyers
favor. In these populations, the sellers offering the higher quality,
at a higher cost, lose money. Meanwhile, sellers offering lower
quality, at a lower cost, earn some extra income by selling their low
quality goods to buyers that expect, and are paying for, higher
quality. When they do this, we found that the mean price actually
increases, evidently because price acts as a signal for quality and
the added uncertainty makes the higher prices more likely to give the
buyer a higher value. We see this in Figure 2, where
population p1 has all sellers returning the same quality while
in each successive population more agents offer lower quality. The
mean price increases in successive populations, but eventually
decreases, after enough sellers start returning low quality goods.
Figure: Price distributions for populations of 0-level buyers and
0-level sellers plus one 1-level seller (#12). In p1 sellers
return qualities 
, in p2 its
, and so on such that by p7 its
. The 1-level seller and seller #5 always
return quality 2.
