Sharing economy platforms have become extremely popular in the last few years, and they have changed the way in which we commute, travel, and borrow among many other activities. Despite their popularity among consumers, such companies are poorly regulated. For example, Airbnb, one of the most successful examples of sharing economy platform, is often criticized by regulators and policy makers. W...

Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life are slowly becoming recognized by researchers as ideal testing grounds for their theories. The unprecedented control over the world’s dynamics and the easy access to its data make them ideal for observation and controlled experiments. Do results from these worlds, however, have bearing on the physical world? While the agents in these worlds ...

The virtual economy operates like the one in the physical world, which is realized by players with two functions–demand and supply, only using the form as avatars. Only that in virtual worlds, the prices of virtual items is decided by the players instead of by its quality or scarcity, so the player behavior analyses became an important tool to monitor the persistent virtual worlds. In order to ...