Perhaps virtual economies defy the rules of my old college textbooks because, so do real economies? One thing that's become abundantly clear is that, if econom

Perhaps virtual economies defy the rules of my old college textbooks because, so do real economies? One thing that's become abundantly clear is that, if economists know how economies work, they're not demonstrating that knowledge. This being said, if one uses a post-Keynesian model, it matches most video games very well. According to such a model, in the real world, any payment or loan by the government is simply a "source", and any payment (i.e. taxes/interest) or loan to the government is simply a "sink". From here, if your only goal is to stabilize inflation at a particular level, you need to reduce sources or increase sinks until such time as inflation reaches that level. This idea gets into trouble in the real world when you have competing goals, but it's probably fine for an MMO. Post-Keynesian theory has its share of problems, but to its credit, it doesn't start by assuming that the amount of money in play is fixed. That makes it as close as we have to ideal for modeling videogame economies.