Živić Nenad, Andjelković Igor, Özden Tolga, Dekić Milovan, Castronova Edward
Nordeus LLC, Bulevar Mihajla Pupina 165v, Belgrade, Serbia.
University of Niš, Faculty of Science and Mathematics, Višegradska 33, Niš, Serbia.
PLoS One. 2017 Oct 18;12(10):e0186407. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186407. eCollection 2017.
We use a 575,000-subject, 28-day experiment to investigate monetary policy in a virtual setting. The experiment tests the effect of virtual currency endowments on player retention and virtual currency demand. An increase in endowments of a virtual currency should lower the demand for the currency in the short run. However, in the long run, we would expect money demand to rise in response to inflation in the virtual world. We test for this behavior in a virtual field experiment in the football management game Top11. 575,000 players were selected at random and allocated to different "shards" or versions of the world. The shards differed only in terms of the initial money endowment offered to new players. Money demand was observed for 28 days as players used real money to purchase additional virtual currency. The results indicate that player money purchases were significantly higher in the shards where higher endowments were given. This suggests that a positive change in the money supply in a virtual context leads to inflation and increased money demand, and does so much more quickly than in real-world economies. Differences between virtual and real currency behavior will become more interesting as virtual currency becomes a bigger part of the real economy.
我们进行了一项涉及57.5万名受试者、为期28天的实验，以在虚拟环境中研究货币政策。该实验测试了虚拟货币初始分配对玩家留存率和虚拟货币需求的影响。虚拟货币初始分配的增加在短期内应会降低对该货币的需求。然而，从长期来看，我们预计货币需求会随着虚拟世界中的通货膨胀而上升。我们在足球管理游戏《Top11》的虚拟实地实验中测试了这种行为。随机挑选了57.5万名玩家，并将他们分配到不同的“碎片”或世界版本中。这些碎片的不同之处仅在于向新玩家提供的初始货币分配。在玩家使用真实货币购买额外虚拟货币的28天内，对货币需求进行了观察。结果表明，在初始分配较高的碎片中，玩家的货币购买量显著更高。这表明虚拟环境中货币供应的正向变化会导致通货膨胀和货币需求增加，而且比现实世界经济中发生得更快。随着虚拟货币在实体经济中所占比重越来越大，虚拟货币与真实货币行为之间的差异将变得更加有趣。
