Articles

Dr. Kevin McCabe and his students at the Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics (CSN) are using the virtual world of Second Life™ to establish a research program that uses virtual worlds as a platform for teaching economics and running economics experiments.  The teaching goal is to use the immersive nature of virtual worlds to involve students in a collaborative exploration of economics concepts. The research goal is to use the persistent nature of virtual worlds to study the emergence of cultural norms and institutional formation in the infinite space of natural language messages. In McCabe's view virtual worlds are a bridge from the classroom, or laboratory, to the natural world.