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One day, carefully designed massive-multiplayer online games will provide better experimentation than agent-based modeling used now in economics. This article illustrates that EVE online is already one step closer to it, since they can introduce "governmental" policies and immediately see the impact on their ingame economy. Very neat!

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As far as I recall, the Eve team actually has a resident economist.

I've always been fascinated by this aspect of Eve... too bad the game itself is such a large time sink.

CCP's economist, sadly, does not understand how EVE's economy works. His reports are many things -- "incorrect", "irrelevant", "incomprehensible" -- but never useful or informative. Most of the research into EVE's economy is performed by the large player power blocs, who have the incentives and knowledge necessary to understand EVE.

Ah, the simulation is complete, then.

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