Day: March 4, 2009

Hey Target Market — Er, I Mean Happy Mutants

Damn. Boing! Boing! certainly took down David Pescovitz’s marketing survey request in a hurry. It’s too bad, because I would have loved to have seen the comment thread there.

Boing! Boing! Marketing Survey

The actual survey is still up here, and its pretty basic market droid stuff. What’s your household income, how much time do you spend online, do you pledge allegiance for Boing! Boing! in the ongoing slime war against Violet Blue (okay, I made that last one up).

For a site like Boing! Boing! that’s all over other people’s failures in this area, there’s not a  goddamned word about privacy or how the data will be treated beyond what you read above (for example, will they log my IP when I fill out the form? I don’t know — the survey doesn’t bother to say anything either way).

At this point, I’d recommend replacing the “Get Illuminated” text in the Boing! Boing! logo graphic to “You Are A Target Market”, but that’s just me. This could be good info for Douglas Rushkoff to have the next time he runs his infomercials — er guest blogs — for Boing! Boing!

David Friedman’s Outline of a World of Warcraft Course

World of Warcraft LogoDavid Friedman (yes, that David Friedman) posted a course outline for a World of Warcraft-center course in economics with some interesting insights,

There is no antitrust law in WoW, which makes it a good place to observe collusive behavior by sellers. My wife, who spends more time in the auction house buying ad selling than I do, has observed both an attempt to corner a market and an attempt, at least partly successful, to form a cartel—a cartel she was invited to join. Her refusal was met by a threat to drive her out of the market by underselling her. The organizer of the cartel had apparently not read Aaron Director’s analysis, reflected in McGee’s classic article on the myth of predatory pricing; it had not occurred to him that if he was selling, at an artificially low price, ten times as many gems as the interloper, he was also losing money ten times as fast. It took only a few days for him to discover the flaw in the strategy and abandon it.

The comments have some good discussion of the oddities of pricing in the Auction House (such as the completely bass-ackward fact that in WoW — unlike the real world — raw materials tend to trade for more than the cost of many finished goods, which can actually help infer the monetary players attach to skill point increases).

Maybe someday Blizzard will release a huge anonymized dataset of Auction House transactions for folks to play with.