We’ve actually got a new author on Terra Nova, Robert Bloomfield, who is an experimental economist looking at virtual worlds. He’s launching a series of talked called “Metanomics”

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/09/metanomics.html

Personally, as I’ve told Robert and others on the blog a few times, I’m a bit wary of approaches that treat virtual world players as lab rats. (Not that Robert wants to do that!) In addition to the concerns about fairness you mention, I think, per your example of the puppy, that kind of environment won’t be very attractive to consumers.

I also think some of the more interesting interesting investigations of virtual worlds will be exploratory and ethnographic, not experimental. In fact, I’m not sure how much experimental validity you can get before you have a sophisticated theory of culture in these environments. Still, I think Robert gets all this and I’m eager to see where he goes with the project.

But even without intentionally experimental structure, you could learn a lot by just looking at virtual worlds today. There is a remarkable diversity of virtual worlds to appeal to different audiences. Eve Online, for example, is a hyper-libertarian society run by profit-seeking corporations — and it produces some really interesting behaviors.

Thanks for the note. To be clear I was not implying that others have not done so.

In any event, what do you think? Will economists start to shape these endeavors? Will Chicago-focused folks set-up systems and rules from that school? Would Sen have an effect if hired?

-Deven