Profit Sharing
In a word, profit sharing means that you get a percentage of whatever the company (B&A) makes. By sharing their goods, employees of B&A can maximize profits, leading to more PEDs for everyone. 
Every member of the company, from trainees to the CEO, do whatever they want to do – hunt, mine, or craft. Whatever materials are gained from those activities are then sold to the company at a price. The price varies depending on the material and how strong the market for that material is right then but you’ll always get more than TT value and, in some cases, much more. B&A takes all the materials it has bought and has members of the trading department trade them for more than what B&A bought them for. Profit is made two ways
: first, by you when you sell to B&A; second, by B&A when they sell to someone else. The first type of profit you keep completely. The second type of profit is collected for a certain time period (I believe it’s a month but I could be wrong). At the end of the time period, the total profits are divided in half. 50% goes to B&A so it can have cash on hand to make future purchases and 50% is given back to the employees to be distributed according to a pre-determined set or rules set out in the B&A Policy.
One of the ideas behind B&A is one of the ideas underlying PE itself – the division of labor makes everyone more effective and efficient. If you had to do everything yourself, you wouldn’t do anything very well. No matter what you’re doing to make money - hunting, crafting, or mining - you will have to trade materials at some point. Without B&A, you have to do the trading yourself. This takes time away from your main job. With B&A, you sell it to the company (making a profit in the process) and then immediately get back to work. Then, when B&A sells it for a higher profit, you also get a cut of that profit. The profit you’re making is not as much for each good but, because you don’t have to worry about trading them, you can get or make more goods that much faster.
The second idea behind B&A (the “sharing” in “profit sharing”) is the power of collective work. If you spent two weeks hunting and collecting oil by yourself, you might, after taking time away from mining, finding a buyer, and completing a trade, be able to sell 100 units of oil for 2.67 PEDs (100 x the 7 day average of 2.67 PECs). If you sell those 100 units to B&A, you’ll make an immediate sale but only get 2.24 PEDs. At first glance
, it looks like you’ve made 43 PECs less than what you could have. But that “loss” is better characterized as a purchase because in taking a loss of 43 PECs on your 100 units of oil, you’re now entitled to a percentage of all the goods and materials bought by B&A – even though you had nothing to do with getting those goods!!
If members of the crafting department make 100 shirts and then sell them to B&A, you own some of those shirts; if members of the hunting department collect 10 short Midastree boards, you own some of those boards. :silly2: When B&A goes to sell all of the goods it owns, you’ll receive a percentage of its profit. That’s in addition to the 2.24 PEDs you made in selling 100 units of oil to B&A. By “buying in” to the company, it’s likely (though not guaranteed) that you’ll more than make up the 43 PEC “loss” you took in selling 100 units of oil to B&A. 