论文标题
大规模虚拟经济的市场干预
Market Interventions in a Large-Scale Virtual Economy
论文作者
论文摘要
大量多人在线角色扮演游戏通常包含成熟的游戏内经济体。这些虚拟经济体也存在许多重要的现实经济现象，例如通货膨胀，经济增长和商业周期。现实世界和虚拟经济体之间的一个主要区别是，在这种情况下，游戏开发人员可以引起经济冲击，这是一个轻松和频率。这些经济冲击通常通过游戏更新或通过社区渠道发出信号，为研究经济干预对市场的影响提供了沃土。在这项工作中，我们研究了旧派符号中游戏中经济市场干预措施的影响，即交易税和物品下沉。使用因果推理方法，我们发现税收不会有意义地影响税收边界的商品交易量，并且该物品下沉有助于奢侈品高价通货膨胀，而不会减少贸易量。此外，我们发现证据表明非法黄金贸易市场相对不受实施市场干预的影响。我们的发现不仅可以对虚拟经济体的市场干预措施，而且对现实世界中的市场产生有用的见解。
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games often contain sophisticated in-game economies. Many important real-world economic phenomena, such as inflation, economic growth, and business cycles, are also present in these virtual economies. One major difference between real-world and virtual economies is the ease and frequency by which a policymaker, in this case, a game developer, can introduce economic shocks. These economic shocks, typically implemented with game updates or signaled through community channels, provide fertile ground to study the effects of economic interventions on markets. In this work, we study the effect of in-game economic market interventions, namely, a transaction tax and an item sink, in Old School RuneScape. Using causal inference methods, we find that the tax did not meaningfully affect the trading volume of items at the tax boundaries and that the item sink contributed to the inflation of luxury good prices, without reducing trade volume. Furthermore, we find evidence that the illicit gold trading market was relatively unaffected by the implemented market interventions. Our findings yield useful insights not only into the effect of market interventions in virtual economies but also for real-world markets.
