[MUD-Dev] Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games)

[Martin Keegan]

On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:

> economies as opposed to real world economies. Turns out there are some
> fairly significant differences which make traditional economic models tend
> to fail. Among these differences is the savings habits of players (eg
> hoarding). A lot of this went over my head, but apparently the economists
> feel that even with an accurate economic model (eg one with huge ongoing
> expenditures) there's enough of a difference in the psychology online that
> people will not do the same things they do in the real world.

A rather new brach of economics which calls itself Experimental Economics
(and basically consists of attempting to verify economic axioms in lab
experiments) has had one really crucial finding: if at the beginning of
the experiment you hold up a bag and say "this bag contains real money,
and you'll get a share of it based on your performance in this
simulation", then the behaviour of the participants is completely
different, and mirrors real world economic activity much more accurately.

Mk




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