Edward Castronova

Edward "Ted" Castronova is a Professor of Telecommunications and Game Design at Indiana University Bloomington. He is known in particular for his work on the economies of synthetic worlds.

Edward Castronova obtained a BS in International Affairs from Georgetown University in 1985 and a PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1991. In between, he spent 18 months studying German postwar reconstruction and social policy at universities and research institutes in Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Berlin. From 1991 to 2000, he worked as an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at University of Rochester, after which he became an Associate Professor of Economics in the College of Business and Economics at California State University, Fullerton. In the fall 2004, he joined the faculty of Indiana University Bloomington as an associate professor of Telecommunication and Cognitive Science, later becoming a full professor and also the Director of Graduate Studies in the department .

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 GNP 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.

...
Wikipedia