Valve Hires Economist-In-Residence To Explore Data From Virtual Economies
from the excellent-news dept
We spend an awful lot of time talking about the economics of digital information, and how it challenges economics that are solely focused on "scarcity." And we've written plenty about how Valve Software has taken a really data-driven approach to its offerings -- often going against "conventional" thinking, but having the data (and revenue) to back up those decisions. So it's neat to see that the company has hired economist Yanis Varoufakis to be its "economist-in-residence" where he'll be exploring the data and sharing some of his findings with the world on a new Valve blog (which doesn't appear to have a Twitter feed... though hopefully they'll fix that). I tend to think it's a good thing when smart companies recognize how they can use real economics (and smart economists) to help them do cool things, so I'm looking forward to what Varoufakis has to say...
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Filed Under: data, digital content
Companies: valve
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So which school of voodoo is Varoufakis?
Chicago Voodoo
Austrian?
Inquiring minds want to know, given how our own Banking Cartel aka Federal Reserve has pwn3d the economics profession.
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Re: So which school of voodoo is Varoufakis?
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CCP
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YAY
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Re: YAY
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Since then I have strictly stuck my head in the sand with networking, but the experience was well worth the effort. I hope that both Dr. Hantula, Mr. Varoufakis and others do learn from online worlds, which I think has the potential to revolutionize many fields of science.
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Misleading / misunderstanding
Given that Mr. Masnick is obviously quite a smart fellow, I believe this is due to an acidentally misleading article rather than a real misunderstanding on his part.
Still, I think this is quite an important difference: Studying the virtual economies inside the games (traded in game money of some sort) ist of course a very much simplyfied model of economies, with some outside influence not present in real world economics (like money sinks / money springs), but I still believe insight into fundamental principles can be gleamed from that. And in a really data driven and empirical way unavailable in real economies as well explained by Mr. Varoufakis.
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