Brad Plumer reports on the economists who supervise the virtual economies of massively multiplayer online games:
In Eve Online, [Eyjólfur] Guðmundsson oversees an economy that can fluctuate wildly — he says it expanded 42 percent between February 2011 and February 2012, then contracted 15 percent by the summer. His team will periodically have to address imbalances in the money supply. For instance, they can curb inflation by introducing a new type of weapon, say, to absorb virtual currency — not unlike the way a central bank might sell bonds to shrink the money supply. (In theory, Eve Online’s currency has real-world value — the highest-level spaceships, the Titans, are worth the equivalent of $5,000 to $8,000.)
Plumer explains how a "lack of oversight has caused havoc in some games":
In summer 2007, the game Second Life experienced a banking crisis not unlike the one that would grip the United States the following year. Thousands of players had entrusted money in virtual banks that had turned around and invested in lucrative land deals and casinos. When the deals soured all at once, panic ensued. Ordinary depositors found they couldn’t withdraw cash from ATMs, and one bank, Gingko Financial, lost its customers $750,000 in real-life money. The game designers had to step in and ban certain types of lending.
One such economist recently analyzed the "beta" economy prior to the launch of Guild Wars 2, following up with a report last week on the economic imbalances that cropped up.
The Dish 