Experimenting on Virtual Worlds

This Marginal Revolution post from September, 2007 explains an idea I was trying to explain in yesterday's post about networks: "What makes virtual worlds important for economics is that for the first time ever, macro-economists will be able to do experiments. I predict that we will see some very interesting experiments in the near future." This is true across the board, actually. What makes the web important is that for the first time ever we are all able to do large scale experiments.