Virtual game world hires real economist

Iceland-based company studying its Eve Online denizens, who number about 200,000 players, or about two-thirds of the country's population.

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[Hark0n]

His first task should be to look at ISK farming's impact on the EVE economy

Here is something for you to study Mr. Economist:

In some cases whole alliances may rely on renting out space to ISK farming sweat-shops that with 100's of accounts do nothing but shoot NPCs over and over for their bounties of more than 90 million ISK per account per day.

There is not much effort on behalf of the real players in those alliances to obtain ISK when a percentage of daily farmed income is given to the alliance by the ISK farmers as rent... this leads to devalue of ISK which leads to inflation which leads to more ISK farming... and so on.

This economist should also look into WHY ISK farming is viable in EVE in the first place and I think he will find that the answer is that it takes TOO MUCH TIME for many players to obtain enough ISK for various fun items and skills in the game in any other way than to buy ISK from some web site...

Since I am on a roll telling him what to work on first I am also going to make his recommendation to EVE developers for him:
"Make it a little easier and/or less time consuming for a regular 2-hour-a-day player to make a few hundred million and ISK farmers will naturally disappear. More players will dare to fight and loose their ships and the game will become more dynamic/exciting."