As you probably know, I'm dedicating myself to creating an economic strategy game.

I was thinking how to add economic intrigue. The players should be able to use their wits to outsmart the economic system, recreating Enron, or the global financial crisis, hedge funds, whatnot.

Has anybody watched The Corporation, or Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, or The Keiser Report?

You could look at what there are currently laws against, then remove those laws so people can use those strategies in your game. Insider trading? You could have bribable NPCs, or players who could buy and sell the stock of a corporation whose behavior they controlled. Make your company look bad, stock prices fall, you buy it all, say oh, things are much better this week, stock prices go up, sell it off again... Monopolies - can you buy and/or threaten your competition into nonexistence? Hoarding, price-fixing; an in-game script that could auto-buy and auto-sell at certain prices would help that. Artificial scarcity too; sit on a pile of an item, only list one for sale at a high price, auto-list another at the same price as soon as the first is sold. Limited amounts of resources generated for the whole game per day and a lack of taxes or selling fees would all encourage people to manipulate the market. A currency exchange is great too.

I think this could be one of those moments where we sit back and think about what message our game is sending.

Is there any way to prevent someone from recreating Enron?

You 'll have to provide more then "economic" and "strategy,"

both terms are very broad

Maybe outline the decisions you've already made, like;

TB/RT

trade

ownership/control the player has

goal of the game

etc.