Be your own market maker, where the price is just the midpoint of your last two offers and every bid moves it.
Each round you post a buy or sell offer with a quantity and a price. Your reference price is simply the midpoint of your two most recent offers, so it follows wherever you push it. Fair value drifts on its own, and your job is to buy below it and sell above it for profit.
A market maker is a real role: a participant who quotes both a buy and a sell price and profits on the spread, and whose quotes are posted into an order book that everyone else reads.
The original idea is to remove everyone else. Your reference price is simply the midpoint of your own two most recent offers, so the market follows wherever you push it while fair value drifts on its own.
That isolates the one thing a real market maker cannot control for: your own influence on the price you are trying to trade against. With no counterparties, every offer is both a trade and a distortion of the benchmark you are being judged by.
Market of One is an original free browser economy puzzle about being your own order book, a numbers game of self-influence and timing. Play instantly, no sign-up.