DailyDirt: Economic Phenomena, Not Just Theories
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
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]
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Filed Under: charity, economics, everquest, gambling, lotteries, prize linked savings, virtual marketplaces
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if only...
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Re: if only...
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.
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Premium bonds
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Fiscal diet
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The Last Word
“Premium bonds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Bond