This article proposes an empirical test of whether aggregate economic behavior maps from the real to the virtual. Transaction data from a large commercial virtual world – the first such data set provided to outside researchers – is used to calculate metrics for production, consumption and...

In sports, as in all other fields of human life, there are written rules and then there are unwritten rules. An example of the former in soccer is the offside rule: a pass only is legal if at least two defenders are between a pass-receiver and the goal when the pass is made. An example of the...

“The Bank will strengthen management of the virtual currencies used in online games and will stay on the lookout for any assault by such virtual currencies on the real economic and financial order.” When the world first heard of virtual currencies in the early years of this century, some...

A “digital value transfer system” (DVT) is a computer program that moves purchasing power from one person to another by exchanging different forms of virtual currency. In this Essay, I will give examples of DVTs and explain how they work. Then I will use the economic theory of budgets to...

Over the past decade the number and scope of so-called virtual economies has risen rapidly. Careful study reveals that the label “virtual”, while useful in a descriptive way, does not identify anything economically unique. Virtual economies tend to behave like any other economy and also...

This paper provides a case study of how a board game can be modified to generate a serious game. We argue that board games are an interesting medium for serious games, especially when the goal is to teach players about particularly complex systems. In that case, the transparency of a board game...

We report results of an experiment on prices and demand in a fantasy-based virtual world. A virtual world is a persistent, synthetic, online environment that can be accessed by many users at the same time. Because most virtual worlds are built around a fantasy theme, complete with magic,...

The history of poverty lines suggests that they are determined jointly with poverty policy in the same political game. If the definition of poverty is endogenous, however, why do altruistic voters allow poverty to persist indefinitely, as seems to be the case in real life? A simple...

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...

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...