<DIV>From <I>EverQuest</I> to <I>World of Warcraft</I>, online games have evolved from the exclusive domain of computer geeks into an extraordinarily lucrative staple of the entertainment industry. People of all ages and from all walks of life now spend thousands of hours—and dollars—partaking in this popular...</i></i></div>

This paper estimates a formal model of social norms with multiple equilibria using data from the Add-Health Survey of 20,000 U.S. high school students. The results suggest that there is considerable diversity in social norm equilibria, with some schools enforcing norms against sexual activity...

In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called "Norrath", populated by an exotic but industrious people. Having just returned from a dangerous exploratory journey through this new world, I can report a number of interesting findings about its people and economy....

We analyze data from the Survey of Consumer Finances estimate the response of credit card demand to standard price and income effects. We model credit card demand as a two-stage process, with consumers obtaining limits in the first stage and then borrowing some fraction of those limits in the...

Currently, economists' models of the evolutionary selection of utility function parameters are generally based on two assumptions. First, it is assumed that utility parameters must serve Darwinian fitness, in the sense that individuals who maximize utility are also maximizing their biological...

The paper develops an evolutionary selection model of the cultural transmission of preferences, focusing on the survival probability of certain preference types. The fitness of a preference is defined in terms of the ease with which its carrier can transmit the preference to the young. For...

Several million people currently have accounts in massively multi-player online games, places in cyberspace that are effectively large-scale shared virtual reality environments. The population of these virtual worlds has grown rapidly since their inception in 1996; significantly, each world also...