In the public market, I notice there is a column header that says 'asking price'. The prices are greyed out and generally less than the 'best price'. What's up with that?

Standby orders .. people wants stuff for cheaper prices

"Asking price" is the current highest priced standing order for that good. If there is no standing order, then asking price is listed with a dash (-).

From the ingame tutorial:
"Standing orders allow our country to conveniently purchase goods even when we aren't logged in. If we put up an order for Q quantity at price $P of good G, then our country will buy purchase up to Q units of G for all prices less than or equal to $P."


Offtopic: I bet a lot of people don't read the in game tutorial texts. Such as this one:
"Account for random chance!
All attacks have some element of chance. Our generals calculate that if we send more than 110% of the defender's power our attacks will be successful more than 99% of the time."

Speaking of asking price, I believe this is a FIFO queue. I tested it on a different server, highest asking price doesn't actually get first crack at the good. Any orders ahead of you w/ an asking price higher than a good will get filled first.

1st order in gets stuffs 1st and then 2nd etc and orders are dropped into bottom when those are partially filled and eventually expire (to avoid 1 player hogging all cheap stuffs like bushels in whole set).

There are several threads explaining how it works, LATC. :)

Here's one.

http://www.earthempires.com/...sed%3F-28639?t=1388695060