Game character, or avatar, acts as the nexus of virtual assets that the player collects and produces while exploring online game worlds. What is the value of this virtual identity in the online game community? Furthermore, what are the components of play that provide added-value to the players?...

The impact of information technology (IT) on the stability of market equilibrium is explained from a simple microeconomic standpoint. Attributes of a dynamically stable “virtual” market equilibrium are described assuming consumer rationality, an elastic supply curve, and minimum static...

In many respects, the commercial and social interactions within virtual worlds are essentially the same as those interactions conducted face-to-face or over less engrossing technologies, however, the immersive nature of the virtual world redefines the nature of the experience. Because virtual...

Selling virtual goods for real money is an increasingly popular revenue model for massively-multiplayer online games (MMOs), social networking sites (SNSs) and other online hangouts. In this paper, we argue that the marketing of virtual goods currently falls short of what it could be. Game...

Players in online games are claiming the right to trade virtual “goods,” something which is contested by game developers and generally prohibited by the contracts they offer to prospective players. This article argues that although this claim does not fit easily into the framework of...

We model the spread of news as a social learning game on a network. Agents can either endorse or oppose a claim made in a piece of news, which itself may be either true or false. Agents base their decision on a private signal and their neighbors' past actions. Given these inputs, agents follow...