Decisions are connected.
Pricing affects demand. Production creates inventory risk. Marketing consumes cash before it creates customers. Strategy is a system, not a checklist.
ABOUT MARKUP MARKETS
Business decisions make more sense when they connect.
Markup Markets is a free browser-based business simulation where players run competing companies inside the same evolving market. Product, pricing, marketing, production and finance decisions interact, so strategy has visible consequences.
WHY IT EXISTS
From isolated concepts to connected decisions.
Business courses often teach pricing, forecasting, marketing, operations and finance as separate topics. In practice, those decisions affect one another. Markup Markets was built to put those connections into a competitive setting where players have to choose, commit and adapt.
There is no single predetermined strategy to copy. Companies compete in the same market, react to the same signals and can succeed for different reasons. That makes the outcome useful not only as a score, but as material for discussion and reflection.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Built around decisions that are worth explaining.
Competition matters.
Players do not compete against a fixed answer key. They compete against other companies that can change prices, positioning, spending and capacity.
Learning continues after the result.
Reports, instructor controls, reflections and debrief tools are designed to help players explain what happened and why their original assumptions were right or wrong.
INDEPENDENTLY CREATED
Built independently, tested carefully.
Markup Markets is independently developed rather than being tied to a textbook, publisher access code or paid classroom platform. The aim is to keep the simulation accessible while still giving instructors enough structure to use it seriously.
Development has included formula-level modeling, adversarial strategy testing, interface revisions and more than 10,000 development simulation runs. Those tests are used to find balance problems, unrealistic incentives and technical failures before they reach a classroom.
Markup Markets v1.0 is the first complete public release. The project is currently in early access for educator and classroom feedback, with future changes guided by real use as well as continued internal testing.