Demand based IPO price points.

So an interesting problem that a fake market has is that nothing has real world value, so things like IPO price points and the number of shares to offer are all arbitrary values.  Because of this we are, as least right now, going to try out using a demand based system to set the IPO price point.  Somewhat like a slient auction style of distributing the initial shares of a given stock.  Mix that in with another philosophy of ours, which is that we want users to be able to add stocks into the system with minimal intervention from the game's administrators and you have an even more interesting system.

Heres our thoughts.  IPO's are generated in a 3 part system:

1. Stocks are added to the market by a user searching for a stock that's never been "hit" before inside the PopStocks system.  If we can find a facebook "page" (as opposed to a "profile" for a person) for this search, and it's in one of the qualified "page sections" of facebook (for example, musician/band) we generate a PopStocks page for the search and put it into a "pre-IPO" state.   In this state anyone who searches for the same thing will generate a vote for that stock in our back end.  From here we can see which stocks are getting a lot of buzz and need to have an IPO issued.
2. Manually, a PopStocks administrator looks at the list of pre-IPO stocks and the ones with the most "votes" are considered for an IPO.  We set a launch date for a given IPO and push that into the database.  This moves a stock from pre-IPO to an "IPO Pending" state.  The users who landed on the page previously are notified that buy orders are now open for this stock.
3. And here's where the silent auction mentality comes in... Based on the price points users put in their buy orders we generate an IPO price.  The goal of our system here will be to cut off the low ball outliers and fill as many of the pending buy orders as possible so that on launch day the giant sell order generated by the IPO system gets bought up very quickly and the stock becomes an active commodity on the market.  Nothing is worse than watching an IPO sell order sit for weeks because the price point was too high!

So in general we now have a system where in-game demand determines both if a stock will ever go up for sale, and then sets the price point for that initial set of shares going out during the IPO event, with pretty minimal work from the administrators.

Comments, ideas?  Let us know what you think in the comments section.