I asked this is help channel got no, or useless answers… When I go to submit a manufacturing job on the industry screen, the game estimates the value of the minerals needed for the job. How does it get these estimates? The numbers don’t seem to match the market.
Example: Right now Megacyte’s best sell price in “the forge” region is 359.89 ISK per unit. the lowest sell price in the same region is 359.88 ISK per unit. However the industry screen (the one where you submit jobs via blueprints) indicates that the estimated price of Megacyte is 372.80 ISK.
CCP has never been completely explicit on this, largely to prevent people from trying to game the algorithm.
It is however, some moving average or median of the price the item has traded at, probably with some refinements to remove outliers, and reduce the impact of manipulation attempts and is for a time window, maybe the last 30 days. And traded everywhere in New Eden.
It is pretty good at giving a reasonable rough number of what people think something is worth, but won’t reflect properly recent movements in price or the local market conditions away from the trade hubs. You probably shouldn’t use it as part of your industry calculations.
CCP uses this to calculate destroyed value for insurance. As @Black_Pedro mentioned, it’s probably a 30 day moving average across the entire cluster with a 3-Sigma rule to remove outliers. If you maintain an inventory of production material, it probably gives a better indication of the average cost of that inventory than current Jita pricing!