Edward Castronova

Edward Castronova is Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington whose area of study includes work on virtual or synthetic economies.

His works on synthetic worlds and their economies, and on EverQuest in particular, have attracted considerable attention. His paper on Norrath, a fictional planet in the EverQuest universe, Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier (2001) is available on SSRN. It claims, for example, that Norrath has a per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria, higher than that of China and India, and that a unit of EverQuest currency is worth more than the Yen or Lira.

See also

• Virtual Economy

External links

• Edward Castronova's webpage
• Can game design make your company more efficient? from ZDNet (12.3.06)
• Real-world success with virtual goods from News.com (2.7.07)

Papers

• Castronova, Edward. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," CESifo Working Paper No. 618, December 2001.
• Castronova, Edward. "On Virtual Economies," CESifo Working Paper Series No. 752, July 2002.
• Castronova, Edward. "The Price of 'Man' and 'Woman': A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthethic World," CESifo Working Paper Series No. 957, June 2003.

Media

• BBC News - Virtual gaming worlds overtake Namibia
• Norrath Economic Report Now Available - Slashdot.org on Castronova's report
• The Walrus Magazine: "On-line fantasy games have booming economies and citizens who love their political systems. Are these virtual worlds the best place to study the real one?"

Books

• Edward Castronova. Synthetic Worlds, University of Chicago Press (2005). ISBN 0226096262