Play Money

Download or read book Play Money written by Julian Dibbell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-09 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Play Money explores a remarkable new phenomenon that's just beginning to enter public consciousness: MMORPGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments the size of continents. With city-sized populations of nearly full-time players, these games generate their own cultures, governments, and social systems and, inevitably, their own economies, which spill over into the real world. The desire for virtual goods -- magic swords, enchanted breastplates, and special, hard-to-get elixirs -- has spawned a cottage industry of "virtual loot farmers": People who play the games just to obtain fantasy goods that they can sell in the real world. The best loot farmers can make between six figures a year and six figures a month.Play Money is an extended walk on the weird side: a vivid snapshot of a subculture whose denizens were once the stuff of mere sociological spectacle but now -- with computer gaming poised to eclipse all other entertainments in dollar volume, and with the lines between play and work, virtual and real increasingly blurred -- look more and more like the future.

Download or read book Killer Poker Online written by John Vorhaus and published by Lyle Stuart. This book was released on 2003 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Killer Poker Online" is the second in Vorhaus's winning new series that willteach players how to adopt a warrior approach toward poker and will encouragethem to completely change the way they think about the game.

Download or read book Prediction Markets written by Leighton Vaughan Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does one effectively aggregate disparate pieces of information that are spread among many different individuals? In other words, how does one best access the ‘wisdom of the crowd’? Prediction markets, which are essentially speculative markets created for the purpose of aggregating information and making predictions, offer the answer to this question. The effective use of these markets has the potential not only to help forecast future events on a national and international level, but also to assist companies, for example, in providing improved estimates of the potential market size for a new product idea or the launch date of new products and services. The markets have already been used to forecast uncertain outcomes ranging from influenza to the spread of infectious diseases, to the demand for hospital services, to the box office success of movies, climate change, vote shares and election outcomes, to the probability of meeting project deadlines. The insights gained also have many potentially valuable applications for public policy more generally. These markets offer substantial promise as a tool of information aggregation as well as forecasting, whether alone or as a supplement to other mechanisms like opinion surveys, group deliberations, panels of experts and focus groups. Moreover, they can be applied at a macroeconomic and microeconomic level to yield information that is valuable for government and commercial policy-makers and which can be used for a number of social purposes. This volume of original readings, contributed by many of the leading experts in the field, marks a significant addition to the base of knowledge about this fascinating subject area. The book should be of interest to anyone looking at monetary economics, economic forecasting and microeconomics.

Download or read book Predictocracy written by Michael Abramowicz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Predicting the future is serious business for virtually all public and private institutions, for they must often make important decisions based upon such predictions. This text explores how institutions might improve their predictions and arrive at better decisions by means of prediction markets.

Download or read book Prediction Markets written by Stefan Luckner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-11-04 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accurate predictions are essential in many areas such as corporate decision making, weather forecasting and technology forecasting. Prediction markets help to aggregate information and gain a better understanding of the future by leveraging the wisdom of the crowds. Trading prices in prediction markets thus reflect the traders’ aggregated expectations on the outcome of uncertain future events and can be used to predict the likelihood of these events. This book demonstrates that markets are accurate predictors. Results from several empirical studies reported in this work show the importance of designing such markets properly in order to derive valuable predictions. Therefore, the findings are valuable for designing future prediction markets.

Download or read book I WANT TO Make Money in the Stock Market written by Chris M. Hart and published by OutskirtsPress.com. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The simple, effective techniques in this step-by-step book will teach readers how to protect their investments and understand exactly what the risks are and how to minimize them.

Download or read book Boys' Life written by and published by . This book was released on 1988-09 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boys' Life is the official youth magazine for the Boy Scouts of America. Published since 1911, it contains a proven mix of news, nature, sports, history, fiction, science, comics, and Scouting.