Romothecus

So, last semester I was taking a basic antitrust class. One day after the class I go home and start playing WoW. At this point I'm trying to raise money for my arcanite bars for Thunderfury, so one thing I'm doing is smelting dark iron and selling the bars on the AH, or making simple things like Dark Iron Shoulders.

Shortly after putting a bunch of dark iron bars on the auction house, I receive a tell from another player whom I recognize as another dark iron seller. He says, "Let's agree to not charge less than 9g per dark iron bar." And I tell him, "Absolutely, good plan." The next thing I think is, "Minimum price fixing is a per se violation of the Sherman Act lol." But of course I don't seriously think that anything that happens in the game could really be an antitrust significant act.

But then again, could it be? Of course the EULA and TOS are replete with statements like "Blizzard recognizes no property interests outside of World of Warcraft" etc., but then again an antitrust action wouldn't necessarily require a property interest, just a conspiracy to restrain competition. And certainly Blizzard recognizes "property interests" internal to World of Warcraft, because GMs will act on accusations of "scamming."

This presumes that the EULA and TOS are valid to begin with, which hasn't been settled in the Ninth Circuit, as far as I know.

Just some ramblings off the top of my head on a fairly silly topic. :) But certainly in Second Life or Project Entropia, it seems like you could potentially file antitrust complaints against other players based on their game actions.

Sort of off-topic given the forum, but then again it's Saturday afternoon and I have nothing better to do.

 

Fermion

wish i had the brain power to make sense of that.

http://wow.tachyonsix.com.nyud.net:8...37576PeFvM.png

 

• hellsoap

the obvious course of action here is to agree to sell at that price with him, then buy all of his and ramp up the prices

 

Romothecus

Not so much brain power as indoctrination into the jargon. :) As one of my exams said and then had us discuss, "Every profession is a conspiracy against the public."

 

• saramin

Bingo.

Marginal revenue and marginal cost don't really exist in WoW except as a function of time, which is itself unit elastic and can't be moldable. In other words, you play to have fun and market supply is created as a byproduct of that. The unit to unit curve is not something that has measurable opportunity cost available to it and is instead variable on outside factors independent of the market (free time, saturation, real life obligations). Thus since for common goods on the AH all firms (players) are operating under perfect competition (no product differentiation, no barriers to entry) at monopoly levels of market equilibrium with no deadweight loss(D=ATC), firms in collusion have no incentive to not cheat given that they all earn short-term economic profit and have thus have capitol to claim market share from firms who do abide by the agreement.

It's a completely hilarious form of market structure.

As an aside, if I could graph the Nash equilibrium for a prisoner's dilemma in WoW I think my life would be complete.

 

Kir

Yea, but as soon as you buy all his stock, someone else who has had some stockpiled, or just made some, will throw up more of the same materials. If he throws up 5 stacks, and 10 people want to buy a stack of this material. He has taken 5 potential sales away. If you bought more then 5 stacks from the original guy that you re-listed, then your most likely going to lose money.

It's entirely possible to do it, but you have to be logged on alot of the time that your auctions are up, checking the AH every 5-10 minutes, to buyout anyone who lists at a cheaper rate. I've done it before with runecloth, back when supply was lower and demand was higher then it is now. Made about 30g in one day just buying and selling it, and then another 50g in subsequent days selling the remaining stacks at a more normal price (though still high, as my day of monopoly had driven prices up for a few days) when I wasn't on enough to keep my iron fist on the market.

 

Romothecus

The idea of cornering the market on a good you can mine in an instance seems like it would be pretty difficult, and as Kir says, any monopoly rents you hope to extract only incentivize new entrants.

 

GSpot

 

Zarplex

[09:12] Shail: What is happening on our forums
[09:12] Zarplex: ?
[09:12] Shail: http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...145336#p145336
[09:12] Shail: is this thread as retarded as it looks

Nope, even more retarded than it looks.

 

Romothecus

And your point is?

Dark Iron deposits still spawn in instances. How am I going to corner a market on something when anyone, at any time, can zone into BRD solo and get 3-4 veins without breaking a sweat?

 

◊ Double-Neg

Yes exactly, the point is this thread sucks, this suck in general, this is going away now. Send shit like this back to the WoW Forums.

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