DailyDirt: Economic Phenomena, Not Just Theories

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Dec 10th 2012 5:00pm — Michael Ho

It's sometimes difficult to verify economic theories in the real world because it can be expensive to "test" really important policies. But as more and more people play increasingly realistic video games with active marketplaces, there may be ways to observe real economic phenomena in virtual economies. Here are just a few interesting observations on the topic of scarcity.

Using 60TB of data from 400,000 Everquest players over 4 years, we can verify some economic behaviors in the virtual world and test economic policy decisions. Maybe these researchers should test out a bunch of virtual "fiscal cliff" scenarios.... [url]
Retailers need to think a bit more about charitable programs that simply donate items to developing markets. Flooding a developing market with free goods isn't the optimal way to encourage market stability and create robust infrastructure. [url]
Prize-Linked Savings (PLS) is a banking scheme to encourage people to save more of their earnings by offering a lottery prize for savings deposits. So instead of lotteries always being a tax on the mathematically challenged, in this system, people can at least earn some interest by gambling. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: charity, economics, everquest, gambling, lotteries, prize linked savings, virtual marketplaces

4 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 10 Dec 2012 @ 5:06pm

if only...
the federal govt could create a prize-linked-savings account for itself.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- mudlock (profile), 10 Dec 2012 @ 5:26pm
  
  Re: if only...
  I know this is meant to be a joke, and that I'm about to ruin it but:
  
  A PLS works by taking a portion of the interest that would be paid to all savers, siphoning it off, and giving it all to one winner. But the government already has a way to siphon off everyone else's savings: create inflation. Which, arguably, it should be doing now anyway, so I guess you're right after all.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Old Fool (profile), 11 Dec 2012 @ 3:26am

Premium bonds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Bond
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
ChrisB (profile), 11 Dec 2012 @ 5:50am

Fiscal diet
Can we all agree to stop calling it the fiscal cliff and call it the fiscal "diet" instead? Sure, balancing your budget is tough, just like stopping drinking. But the cure for a hangover is not another beer.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]