The merchant system in oblivion made it way to easy to rich in the game by letting merchants having unlimited money, and once you were rich there was nothing to spent it on. im hoping its something like fallout 3's merchants system were theyhave a limited amount of money at one time then you have to wait for them to restock........ideas? opinions?
There are draw backs with each system. In Morrowind, people inflated a shop owner's coinage by buying all of his cheap items (that they had sold to him in the days before, for this very purpose of buying them back), thus jacking up his gold count to extreme amounts, then they sold him their expensive item. They then slept and sold all the cheap items back for full value (you could do this with creeper pretty easy, as he bought items at full value). It was a very inventive form of inflation.
The problem with Oblivion was that its merchants had unlimited money, but a maximum buying cap. This was really silly, and I'd have to say I would prefer a system's like Morrowind, if we were to not get a really improved merchant system.
What I think SHOULD be done, however, is that a merchant ebbs and flows with his or her item stock and total value. If that merchant just sold a lot of his or her merchandise, their prices would start to raise as they lost stocks, and their total capital would increase. Of course, the only way to accomplish this would be to have a market that ran even without the player. I believe we've actually heard about a system similar to this, as they mentioned that a town had its own self contained market that reacted to trends in how NPCs and the player bought items. Basically, if you pump a whole lot of items into a merchant, that item will be next to worthless, even if it was a ton of steel swords, simply because of the huge amount of them. Its supply and demand on a very basic level.