Is Your Avatar Tax-Deductible Too?
Fascinating to find that fake worlds have real economies. Notwithstanding the fact that the fantasy money has a real world exchange rate, there is actually relatively little that these transactions can tell us about sufficient or necessary starting conditions for an equitable society.
The randomly equal initial distribution of goods, the low penalty paid for death of one of your avatars, and, obviously enough, the fact that it's not real life, mean that these games can never accurately model real world behavior in total.
However, I imagine that they will prove useful for inquiries into specific types of economics problems, where the limited conditions won't botch the experiment.
