Caught in the Web? Addictive behavior in cyberspace and the role of goal-orientation

New online 3-D virtual worlds are complex and differ significantly from each other. In this study we examine whether the type of virtual world is likely to make a difference on how addictive behavior develops and its subsequent outcomes. We examine the effect of goal-orientation on the degree to which cognitive absorption within the virtual world results in addiction and in the impact of addiction on continuance and purchasing intentions. Using surveys conducted in World of Warcraft (goal-oriented) and Second Life (experience-oriented) virtual worlds and analysis via ANOVA, we find that while cognitive absorption contributes to the development of addiction, which subsequently leads to increased continuance and spending intentions in goal-oriented virtual worlds, none of these relationships hold in the case of the experience-oriented world. Goal-oriented virtual worlds provide a problematic conduit for addictive behavior and marketing manipulation and the authors believe that they would benefit from further attention by policy-makers. Experience-oriented virtual worlds do not appear to provide the same dangers and would appear to be more healthy avenues for marketing-consumer engagement.     

The World Distribution of Income And Its Inequality, 1970–2009

This paper provides a full decomposition of world inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, in the period 1970–2009. In particular, using the Analysis of Gini (ANOGI), the paper describes the evolution of between inequality, within inequality, and the impact of overlapping on both factors. While there is evidence that between inequality in the last decade significantly declined due to the rapid Chinese growth, within inequality and overlapping went in the opposite direction. Furthermore, with the exception of some Asian countries, the rest of the world has not moved significantly. As a result, world inequality remains high by any standard.     

Making real money in virtual worlds: MMORPGs and emerging business opportunities, challenges and ethical implications in metaverses

Today, millions of people from around the globe play online role playing games (MMORPG), in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world, either using their existing identities in the physical world, or more often than not, through new virtual identities that might not even be remotely linked to the identities of the players in the physical world. The number of users is growing at an exponential rate and we are probably on the verge of a new development that is going to be as significant as the Internet itself. This positioning paper will discuss the business opportunities and challenges of such a virtual world, that of Second Life, and will examine the resultant corporate social responsibility implications focusing on the ethical and policy-related ones. This will help to identify important research questions that need to be systematically addressed.     

Externality Policy Reform: A General Equilibrium Analysis

We characterize Pareto‐improving and equilibrium‐preserving policy reforms in a second‐best (Diamond/Mirrlees) world with a consumption externality. A counterintuitive finding is that, starting from an initial equilibrium with no direct quantity control on the externality, it is possible that all Pareto‐improving and equilibrium‐preserving directions of change require an increase in a negative externality. We provide intuition for these results by establishing a nexus between Guesnerie's approach to designing (tax) policy reforms and the standard Kuhn–Tucker technique for identifying the manifold of feasible Pareto‐optimal states, given the instruments available to the policy maker.     

基于风险溢价的虚拟经济体与现实经济体间的资本流动分析

从网络虚拟经济与现实经济的关系出发,发现人们身份的转换和资本的流动是虚拟与现实世界之间最主要的、动态的联系渠道。探寻了影响套利资本在现实经济体和网络虚拟经济体间流动的因素和机理,建立了基于经济风险溢价的虚拟-现实套利资本流动模型。最后,对游戏运营商如何避免套利资本的冲击、维护虚拟经济的长期稳定和健康发展提出了建设性的建议。     

Divergence,Convergence, and the Gains From Trade*

This paper is about a country which has enjoyed a comparative advantage in producing some good(s) and suddenly finds its trading partners increasing their productivity in producing precisely those same goods; e.g., the US with its big lead in many kinds of manufacturing production in the 1950s and 1960s, and the rest of the world catching up in the same kinds of goods in the 1970s and 1980s. This is what the paper means by “convergence.” We show that such convergence results in an absolute loss of real income and standard of living for the original “leader” country.     

Keynes and the international monetary system: Time for a tabular standard?

This paper discusses proposals for tabular standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, we focus on Keynes’ proposal for an international tabular standard (ITS) as the gold standard unravelled in the 1930s. The paper explains the origins of Keynes’ ITS proposal which pegged the value of an international reserve to a broad index of primary commodities, weighted in terms of their value in world production. We argue that the ITS should be viewed as an important and enduring component of Keynes’ ideal long-run vision for anchoring the international monetary system, even post-Bretton Woods.     

国外网络货币虚转实交易研究述评

虚转实交易（RMT）是网络时代兴起的一种经济行为,它搭起了一座从虚拟世界到现实经济的桥梁。RMT弱化并模糊了虚拟与现实的边界,使虚拟世界的通货膨胀、价值创造和财富转移通过RMT对现实世界中的财富、税收、福利分配等发生作用。RMT的主体虚拟货币的发行量及需求波动虽然总量很小,但已经显现出可能导致现实货币的汇率浮动的力量,虚拟世界中交易物品在种类和数量急剧增长的背景下催生出现实世界中新的产业链。国外学者从其产生发展、福利效应、价格影响、产业链等不同角度对其进行了研究,本文仅对此加以述评并指出今后RMT的研究取向及一些启示。     

The case for the virtual strike

In this paper we outline the economic rationale behind the virtual strike, and workers’ incentives to use this bargaining solution rather than resorting to standard strike action. We show that, from a welfare perspective, a well-designed virtual strike always dominates a standard strike and it would be most needed precisely when workers have weaker incentives to adopt it. We then discuss the pros and cons of legally regulating the virtual strike rather than leaving it to self-regulation. Finally, we apply our findings to the analysis of Italy’s draft legislation on virtual strikes.     

Re-evaluation of Welfare Changes during the Transition in Poland

The costs of shortages/rationing are not captured by standard consumer price indices. Thus the change in real GDP per capita is an over-estimate of welfare losses in transition economies. In this study virtual prices are used to calculate new cost of living indices, making it possible to construct more accurate pre-reform and post-reform welfare comparisons. The results for Poland using virtual prices show 62-84% decline in welfare over the transition 1987-92. This welfare loss is approximately one-third of the value obtained using actual prices.     

Cooperation in a risky world

We offer a novel investigation of the effect of environmental risk on cooperation in the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism. Our baseline is the standard setting, in which the personal return from the public good is deterministic, homogeneous, and publicly known. Our experimental treatments alter this classic design by making the marginal per capita return from the public good probabilistic. In the homogeneous risk (HomR) treatment, the random draw is made for the whole group, whereas in the heterogeneous risk (HetR) treatment, this happens independently for each group member. Our hypothesis is that different environmental risks may differently affect the ex post payoff inequalities, so that other‐regarding preferences (inequality aversion) may generate higher contributions in HomR than in HetR. Our main result is that the environmental risk does not affect the patterns of cooperation either in the one‐shot or in the finitely repeated version of the game. This suggests that the standard experimental methodology provides a robust and conservative measure of human cooperation.     

Epistemic conditions for rationalizability

In this paper I present conditions, not involving common knowledge of rationality, that lead to (correlated) rationalizability. The basic observation is that, if the actual world belongs to a set of states where the set Z of action profiles is played, everyone is rational and it is mutual knowledge that the action profiles played are in Z, then the actions played at the actual world are rationalizable actions. Alternatively, if at the actual world the support of the conjecture of player i is Dⁱ, there is mutual knowledge of: (i) the game being played, (ii) that the players are rational, and (iii) that for every i the support of the conjecture of player i is contained in Dⁱ, then every strategy in the support of the conjectures is rationalizable. The results do not require common knowledge of anything and are valid for games with any number of players.     

AN EXPERIMENT WITH ULTIMATUM BARGAINING IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT*

We present experimental results on the ultimatum bargaining game which support an evolutionary explanation of subjects’ behaviour in the game. In these experiments subjects interacted with each other and also with virtual players, i.e. computer programs with pre‐specified strategies. Some of these virtual players were designed to play the equitable allocation, while others exhibited behaviour closer to the subgame‐perfect equilibrium, in which the proposer's share is much larger than that of the responder. We have observed significant differences in the behaviour of real subjects depending on the type of “mutants” (virtual players) that were present in their environment.     

International trade of scarce water

Recent analyses of the evolution and structure of trade in virtual water revealed that the number of trade connections and volume of virtual water trade have more than doubled over the past two decades, and that developed countries increasingly import water embodied in goods from the rest of the world to alleviate pressure on domestic water resources. At the same time, as demand continues to increase and climate change threatens to alter hydrological cycles, water scarcity is a growing problem. Does research into virtual water trade need to consider water scarcity and differentiate flows out of water-scarce regions from flows out of water-abundant regions? Previous studies sum and compare virtual water volumes originating in countries experiencing vastly different degrees of water scarcity. We therefore incorporate water scarcity into an assessment of global virtual water flows. We use input–output analysis to include indirect virtual water flows. We find that the structure of global virtual water networks changes significantly after adjusting for water scarcity.     

Trade patterns and institutional change in East Asia

We investigate how trade patterns – institutionally intensive exports (IIX) – affect institutional quality in East Asia compared to the rest of the world, and whether the effect changed due to the Asian financial crisis. To examine this, we use panel data of 117 countries for the period 1988–2007. Our fixed effect model estimation reveals that the effect of IIX on institutional quality is negative and significant for East Asia, while the effect is insignificant for the rest of the world. The negative effect in East Asia is more pronounced for the five East Asian countries that were strongly affected by the crisis – South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand – than for other East Asian countries. Furthermore, our results reveal that the negative effect for East Asia does not change significantly after the crisis, both in the short and long term, and that improvement in institutional quality after the crisis is not different from that of the rest of the world. This suggests that the crisis had no significant impact on East Asia's institutional quality or on the effects of IIX on institutional quality.     

Research on Model of Virtual Organization and Its Practice

This paper discusses an organizational model to be used for both conventional and virtual organizations. The model deals with variable relationships within an organization and provides a framework for overall organizational design that may include relationship among different design variables and external relationship with environment. Based on the researches of virtual organization, this paper also illustrates the new model of organization in the real world such as Beijing 2008 Olympic games and Dongfeng Automobile group.     

网络虚拟物品之法律保护渊源探寻

由于现行法律制度并未对虚拟物品的法律属性做出界定,随着网络交易规模的不断扩大,大量盗窃、不公平交易纠纷、欺诈等围绕网络虚拟物品的权属争议纠纷案件在实践中频发。因此,法律保护虚拟物品的期望是维护虚拟世界和现实世界正常财产秩序的必然要求。本文从法哲学的财产劳动理论、法理学关于财产的界定两方面论证网络虚拟物品财产的属性本质,并通过利益确认的需要、法律价值目的之体现、应有权利之必然的角度分析论证对虚拟物品进行法律保护的必要性。     

TRADE,STRUCTURAL REFORM,AND INSTITUTIONS IN SUB‐SAHARAN AFRICA

Sub‐Saharan African countries have traditionally lagged the rest of the developing world in terms of overall trade relative to gross domestic product. But, there is growing interest among these countries to initiate trade policies and improve quality of institutions as a way to promote trade and boost foreign direct investment. This article extends the gravity model of trade to include proxies for trade reform policy and institutional quality among the 15 countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for data spanning 1984–2006. Alternative methods of estimation based on ordinary least squares, Heckman two‐step procedure, and Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood produce predictions that are consistent with the standard gravity model. They further highlight the evidence of restrictive trade policies and weak institutions that contribute to the failure of ECOWAS countries to boost bilateral trade. (JEL F13, F15, O19, O55)     

On recombinant estimation for experimental data

The recombinant estimation technique of Mullin and Reiley (2006) can be a useful tool for analyzing data from normal-form games. The recombinant estimator falls within a general category of statistics known as U-statistics. This classification has both theoretical and practical implications: (1) the recombinant estimator is optimal (minimum variance) among unbiased estimators, (2) there is a computationally simple method for computing its asymptotic standard error, and (3) the estimation technique can be extended to multiple outcomes and to other types of inferential procedures commonly used for experimental data, such as the sign test. Simulation evidence suggests that researchers should use the asymptotic standard error rather than the standard error of Mullin and Reiley (2006) since the latter exhibits a downward bias. JEL Classification C12, C90 Although the idea of recombinant estimation appears previously in the literature (for example, Mitzkewitz and Nagel (1993) and Mehta et al. (1994)), Mullin and Reiley (2006) is the first attempt at formalizing the econometric methodology and proposing a method for standard-error calculation.     

Models as speech acts: the telling case of financial models

This paper intends to bring Austinian themes into methodological discussion about models. Using Austinian conceptual vocabulary, I argue that models perform actions in and outside of the academic field. This multiplicity of fields induces a variety of felicity conditions and types of performed actions. If for example, an inference from a model is judged according to some epistemological criteria in the scientific field, the representation of the world which the model carries will not be judged by the same criteria outside the scientific field. A model can be considered as a standard in a strict scientific framework, while not being used as part of public policies, or vice versa. However, we focus on the dynamics between different fields.