It All Began With A Strange Email
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a-strange-email/In sharp contrast to our incapacity to perform truly scientific tests in ‘normal’ economic settings, Valve’s digital economies are a marvelous test-bed for meaningful experimentation. Not only do we have a full-information set (making sampling superfluous) but, more importantly, we can change the economy’s underlying values, rules and settings, and then sit back to observe how the community responds, how relative prices change, the new behavioural patterns that evolve. An economist’s paradise indeed…
Academic economist and expert on Greece’s recent collapse, Yanis Varoufakis joins Valve as their economist-in-residence to study and calibrate their digital markets. Valve’s new economics blog should be fascinating in an extremely nerdy kind of way.
