In between, he spent 18 months studying German postwar reconstruction and social policy at universities and research institutes in Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
His paper on Norrath, a fictional planet in the EverQuest universe, Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier (2001) is available on SSRN.
It claims, for example, that Norrath has a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria, higher than that of China and India, and that a unit of EverQuest currency is worth more than the Yen or Lira.
In 2008, he and his team finished work on a MacArthur Foundation-supported academic experiment in massively multiplayer online gaming, Arden: The World of Shakespeare.
They documented that people in fantasy games act in an economically normal way, purchasing less of a product when prices are higher, all other things being equal.