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Fantasy Economics

Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games.
By Robert Shapiro
Updated Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2003, at 11:26 AM PT

The most popular article in the leading economics Web archive doesn't concern tax policy, international trade, or the theory of the firm. It's about an online fantasy game.

During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony's popular online fantasy world of Norrath. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics. The article, which you can download here, not only outpaces the online works of every Nobel laureate, it is also the fourth-most popular article on the entire Social Science Research Network, which contains more than 75,000 professional articles and abstracts in range of social sciences.

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