"We think Milton Friedman would definitely like this," CCP Chief Executive Hilmar Petursson said, referring to the American economist best known for his theory that money supply ultimately drives the boom and bust of the business cycle.
Guodmundsson is also looking into whether lessons learned in running a virtual economy can apply to real-world ones. It's a rich field that is drawing interest since experiments that would be impossible in real life can be arranged with a few software tweaks.
"We watch price bubbles happen in Eve Online. We are thus able to watch in rapid fashion, a mathematical simulation of those price bubbles. We then are in a position to extrapolate price bubbles in the real world and trade on that, in futures or whatnot," Petursson said.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Online Video Game Gets an Economist
I found this article rather neat. An online game with a functional economy and a few tens of thousands of people online at a time ended up hiring an economist to fix financial woes within the game. Despite having perfect data and control over the game's markets (outside of what users did of course), the company managing the game suffered multiple economic disasters within the game. The economic disasters, much like in the real world, resulted in unhappy people. Unlike in the real world, unhappy players were able to simply stop paying their $15 / month and go play somewhere else. They hope that an economist armed with perfect data and a strong hand to manipulate supply and demand will be able to offer up a more stable in game market.
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