What a wonderful demonstration of how you cannot set the price that customers will pay, even as a monopoly. Its a total myth that monopolies get to charge whatever price they want if left alone.

In TBC I played the shard market (whatever the lvl 70 dream shard equiv. is/was). There was, probably still is, one major player. I played at least a little every night, and would look for blues selling below shard market price to DE once to three times an evening, plus farm heroics. Then I would always undercut by 1g so long as I made at least 1g per. If I couldn't do that, I'd just wait a night or two. Anyhow, usually I sold 2-4 to a random player, and the rest would be bought out by the major player. Now for the point: the only way I figure that could work out for him is that *most* of the time, he was the sole AH seller, so even though he sold some of his inventory at a slim margin (the stuff he bought up from myself and others like me), he was always making gold - and surely he was often able to sell from his high margin stock (his own farmed heroics).

One more observation of this major player: He would be in trade channel from time to time offering to buy shards. I figure there was enough folks with excess shards that couldn't be bothered playing the AH that it payed to spend some time seeking them out in trade channel.

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