Professional Farmers

[TheWesson]

IANAE (I am not an economist), but I don't think the farmers contribute that much to inflation or deflation.  They create gold, they create item, they sell the items to the people who bought their gold.

The problem is that they distort the economy.  Stuff that is relativly easily farmed solo(essences, Arcane Crystals) becomes artificially cheep because of them.  This hurts players that want to get togeather some cash for a mount or a BOE purple.  Stuff that is relativly hard to grind solo (RWD's, ZG loot) becomes more expensive because all the bought gold is chasing it.  This hurts anybody who wants those items but doesn't cheat.
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after reading the thread that's my take on it too. Farmers should not cause overall inflation or deflation, but would be expected to distort the economy, making farmed items cheaper and non-farmed items more expensive.

Farmers chasing profitability should result (given a sensible Blizzard) in a situation where all profitable courses of action result in about the same wage per time spent, since high-wage actions will be nerfed down.

Unfortunately, as the electro lanterns demonstrate, Blizzard cant be counted on to act sensibly.

It would be interesting if market forces could be introduced to automatically balance vendor sale prices.

Here's a sketch of such a system:
Vendors offer for sale (at a large markup) everything sold to them.
Vendors adjust their sale prices (and, accordingly, their buy prices) for X depending on how much X they have in stock, and how much they expect to be able to sell it for. (They could also snoop on AH sales to some extent.)
Vendors could also buy from other vendors at a price marked up by transportation distance. This would produce interesting effects like iridescent pearls being more expensive in the Barrens and cheaper in STV.

of course this would be irrelevant to truly useless (grey) items. It's an interesting thought experiment though. Players would always be discovering areas where inefficiencies existed (say that the price of pearls was too high) and balancing those out (by, for example, farming pearls.)