Yanis Varoufakis, a famous economist from University of Athens known for his analyses of Greece’s debt issue and the euro crisis, once mentioned that “Economic theory has come to a dead end – the last real breakthrough were in the 1960s.” Mr.Varoufakis named governments’s fear of economic experiments in the national scale (who can blame them?) and difficulty of conducting these tests as primary culprits. Yanis was later hired by Valve to consult Steam’s cross-gaming virtual market. (Steam allows you to trade vanity virtual goods between different games). Yanis doesn’t play games, but he is a quant nerd, and he believes that gaming is a great sandbox to test economic theories. While I agree that games can provide good real world simulation, you have to treat each games as their own unique environment, failure to realize this, and anything you learn from the simulation will be a waste in the real world.
Read the entire post here: http://miscountingsheep.com/wordpress/2013/11/blabber-about-virtual-economics/
Punkonomics (@DearBalak) 