Economists have turned to video game virtual economies to see how their behavior reflects the real world.  Reporting for Reuters, John Gaudiosi writes that researchers from University of Indiana and USC Annenberg School for Communication have been studying micro-transactions in Sony Online’s Everquest II.

The researchers tracked 314 million transactions in the game and were able to calculate the GDP of one of the game servers.  They found that as more gamers joined and server population soared, its virtual economy exhibited behavior of a developing nation or a country at war, such as an inflation spike.  The researchers believe that studying virtual economies has value in that they are essentially human-run economies and can be tweaked to run controlled experiments.

Read more at Reuters {link no longer active}.