What is shadowprice.com?
Shadowprice.com is a game that's fun to play but hard to win, which you can now download free of charge to give it your best shot. It's a customer retention tool and management decision game to help you successfully compete in a volatile, deregulated marketplace. A shadowprice.com player acts as the management decision maker for one retailer, trying to make money and survive against eight other competitors, including at least one incumbent. Shadowprice.com level 2 is specific to the residential electric power market.

It's a tool for success!
Essentially, shadowprice.com allows its player to test-drive different portfolios in an industry-accurate simulated market without having to worry about real-life losses because of wrong turns. Shadowprice.com is hard to win (if it were easy, you wouldn't learn from it, right?), but it offers unparalleled insight into what works and doesn't work in the player's industry.

Who should play shadowprice.com?
Shadowprice.com Level 2 Version 3: Autopilot is for

• utility professional gamesters
  
  
• economics and marketing student gamesters
  
  
• Nash and near-Nash gamesters
  
  
• anyone who enjoys a challenge and is patient enough to let the computer take the last few thousand steps for a solution.
  
  

Considering all it does, it's quick about it.

Why the name shadowprice.com?
According to the late Nobel Laureate John R. Hicks in Value and Capital, shadow prices are determined by equilibrium conditions. Robert Dorfman, and Nobel Laureates Paul A. Samuelson and Robert M. Solow in Linear Programming and Economic Analysis define shadow prices as the economic rent owed to productive factors, derived as the dual solution to a linear programming problem. Michael D. Intriligator in Mathematical Optimization and Economic Theory defines shadow price as a Lagrange multiplier measuring the sensitivity of a value to changes in a quantity.

Shadowprice.com looks at shadow prices in two ways related to market power and imperfect information. In terms of (one particular manifestation of) market power, Monte Carlo solution shadow prices measure the sensitivity of an efficient or nearly efficient competitive market to power vested in the intransigence of an incumbent and its customers, and to power vested in service providers to reduce competition through merger anticipating behaviors. In terms of imperfect information, shadowprice.com measures losses and gains in household consumer and service provider producer surplus, in price peace and price wars, owing to service providers acting on the basis of the assumed behaviors of other service providers. In other words that capture both concepts, shadowprice.com takes a modern view of shadow price that distinguishes between a market that optimizes (or nearly optimizes) benefit to households and service providers, and the imperfectly informed market that actually exists.

Shadowprice.com is not a dotcom in the E-Commerce sense often associated with the Internet bubble. Dan Hamblin named the URL shadowprice.com to market his simulation tool and game, because shadow prices and what they represent have played a significant role in his answers to technology and policy questions during his professional career.