What attracted you to in-game economics as opposed to real-word economics?
Guðmundsson: It was the experimental element of in-game economics. Within our world, even though it is a completely player-driven, there are still outside changes coming from the developers when we are adding new features into the game or tweaking game mechanics. So, even though we are not doing direct experiments in EVE, we know the upcoming changes and we can then watch what those changes do to the market. When a new patch or expansion is coming out, we have very closely documented the starting point and what we will change. Then we make a hypothesis about how it will affect the market and follow the results to understand if the market reacted the way we thought. This helps us better understand the effects of the changes we’ve made. So, as such, it is like a very large experiment that we can watch and see what how economics applies to social interactions online. So far I can say that I’m really intrigued by how the markets are in line with classic economic theory. Develop: How do the
