There was an interesting post around this very topic related to Eve Online in the last couple of years. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189

There was an interesting post around this very topic related to Eve Online in the last couple of years. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189984/How_I_Used_EVE_Online_to_Predict_the_Great_Recession.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189984/H... What was interesting was that the poster found that factories in game were highly underutilized, and after convincing Eve Online to raise rents, he found that the factories tended to change hands be much more productive.