Price fixing in world?

Well LL made banking illegal ^_^ haha how that would be confidient irl.
But anyway, cartels could be of consern...yet since the digital resources in SL are not dealing with scarcity it's hard to put a prizestag on anything. Apart from land and skills. So yeah, if you are looking for cartels it would be only worth it to look at land prizes and services that require skill, I think.

Look, the truth is that calling SL an "economy" is a farce.

People either pay to play, or play to pay. The former spend USD to buy things, like clothes, bits, and furniture, or they might spend money to finance their creative side - make clothes, bits, and furniture. The people who play to pay need to treat it like an RL business, which means understanding their marketplace, and working with it instead of fighting against it.

I've seen the price some of those RLV scripts, and I have to chuckle. The scripts would literally take me a couple of hours to replicate (they are basically a front end bolted onto the provided reference implementation along with some access control added), and I wouldn't feel bad about handing them out for free, or much cheaper. The only reason I haven't is that I'm lazy. LOL. I'm a pay to play type, and would rather spend my in-world time not working.

I kinda agree.

"2.6 Linden Lab may suspend or terminate your account at any time, without refund or obligation to you."

We saw how well that worked for "She who shall not be named". The DOOM crying when she announced her 10L product line was quite loud. Didn't seem to make much of a difference in the market in the long run.


As for the price fixers, screw em. Be ready for some griefing attempts. But give in on this and the next thing you know the union thugs will want in and the idiots crying for "resident government" will start wanting labor laws.

True. But isn't there always an accusation of wrongdoing, in cases of account termination?

And isn't it just as true that people accused of wrongdoing in 'real life' may be effectively removed from THAT economy (by imprisonment)?

So I'm not sure that the LL declaration is a valid reason for calling SL 'not an economy'.

Well SL is a service of LL and they are smart enough to not keep backdoors open in their terms. My argument would be without such rights there is no fundament to build a economy on.

If your argument is (and I'm trying to confirm that I understood you correctly): If there is a large variety of very attractive-yet-cheap goods available, the result will be that many residents will say 'I'm better off just sitting on a stool for an hour, so as to acquire enough Lindens to buy this very attractive stuff, than spending that hour making stuff of my own.'

If that IS your argument---

I don't see how that's a reasonable conclusion. Isn't it just as likely, when confronted by a large variety of attractive-yet-cheap goods, that residents will decide 'I get so much enjoyment of being in the presence of all these very attractive goods, that it's worth it to me to go Premium for a year and pay only $6/month but get over $4 of that $6 back per month (stipend), to spend on all this very attractive stuff....and I can own a parcel of land to put it all on, and there's so much that's great that maybe I'll spend more than the $6 per month and get a bigger parcel of land, and meanwhile I'll have all this free time to make my own stuff and arrange it all in creative combinations because I get that US$4 back in stipend each month and that buys me a lot of GREAT stuff....'

In other words: isn't the prospect of an abundance of attractive-yet-cheap goods just as likely to be GOOD for SL, as bad?

Except that:
- in real life, you usually expect a trial before imprisonment. In SL, the TOS allows it to be arbitrary.
- in real life, you can incorporate to avoid losing everything even in the case of wrongdoing (a company can't be put in jail). In SL, LL can and will pierce the corporate veil by banning the avs.

Hedonic Adjustment.

Hedonic Adjustment (as used by psychologists, not as used by econometricists) is a phenomenon that's been "blamed" for problems with the RL economy, and that affects the SL one in the same way. Basically, what it says is that when things stay the same, humans tend to become less happy, no matter how good things are. (Otherwise, people such as Bill Gates would be happy all the time.) What makes people happy is when things get better, and they're happiest of all when they MAKE things better.

You can see it in SL - many new people arrive, get a parcel of land, furnish it, maybe have a few parties, and then get bored and quit because, even if everything's high quality, it's too static. It's also why levelling MMORPGs are so popular - you "make things better" every time you play, just by making the experience bar a bit bigger.

That, I think, is the danger with SL becoming _too_ good for consumers - that it becomes so good for consumers that every newbie just spends US$10, buys all they could ever want, and then quits because they have no growth left.

Have a look at the economy in the United States. Consumers demand ever lower prices. In an effort to meet those demands retailers stop carrying goods manufactured in the US and sell cheap imports from China instead. The result? Millions of lost manufacturing jobs and ever increasing trade deficits.

Price fixing is definitely wrong if it involves collusion, but setting prices should be about more than simply undercutting the competition. You also have to think about the long term viability of the market. If every new entrant dramatically undercuts their nearest competitor you eventually get to where there's no room left to undercut because no one's making a profit any longer. In this way the market for user created goods in SL is slowly killing itself and will likely be eventually replaced with real world corporations who use their virtual goods to advertise real world products, because they'll be the only ones who can see a return on their investment.

People should set their prices as they see fit according to what the market will bear, but if people (creators and consumers alike) don't take the long view they end up devaluing the entire market and working against their own future viability. There has to be some balance.

As a SL photographer myself, I have never experienced anyone asking me to change my prices to match the market. Maybe they are already at market, maybe they are high. I don't know. Photographers typically don't publish their price lists in the open as it gives their competition an edge.

In my experience, you typically get what you pay for. If someone wants to charge a dirt cheap price and put in all the extended time in Photoshop for it to release a great product, they are more than welcome to do so. But, it has been my experience that the people charging the rock-bottom prices are typically just doing in-world snapshots with no post-process in Photoshop or other out-of-world software.

Send me a message in-world and I'll gladly send you my price list if you wish to compare yours to mine.

Yumi, fascinating. I had forgotten about that concept.



You seriously think that in a world like SL, it will *ever* suffer from the content getting so good there's no room for growth? SL will die out for other reasons long before that happens.

I think your argument is largely undercut by one major difference between SL and RL: in RL, you can't put time and effort into making a high-quality set of furniture, sell it for $10, and make a profit.

But in SL, you can---because you can sell that same set of furniture to 10,000 people.

Your costs of making and selling one set of furniture are virtually identical to your costs of making that same one set of furniture, and selling thousands and thousands of copies.

This is where the comparison to RL breaks down---and what undercuts your argument against cheap-yet-high-quality SL goods.

Three words: innovate, innovate, innovate.

And a couple more: or die.

I agree, Love.

It doesn't ring psychologically true that the reason people get bored and leave is that the goods available are too attractive (and affordable). If this were the case, the Lindens could change the prim Edit menu to permit only cubes-with-no-textures-and-no-changes, and watch the Resident stats skyrocket!

I mean, it just doesn't make sense.

There is more to SL then just buying and selling things tho. I seen a verry low "drop out rate" with skilled builders and scripters. I think the people how are primair to making SL culture, and contribute on a creative level, don't get bored like the people how try to consume it.
So the trouble might indeed be the level of involvement. No reason to get involved if you have no vision or lust then just to buy stuff and feel "good" about it. It's like parasites who don't realy care nor contribute then right?

I don't mean growth for the economy as a whole, I mean growth for each individual involved in SL.

Not each and every individual, surely? Because then you would be talking about the economy as a whole. Sorry to be pedantic: I don't understand your point, it turns out.

Except that you can't. The market simply isn't that big and content goes stale. You have to keep putting out new merchandise or you lose your repeat customers. The time required to make goods that are competitive keeps going up because the overall skill and quality levels keep going up. At the same time, prices keep going down. If there's no brake on either trend you eventually hit a breaking point where the time required to compete is too high compared to the potential for profit because pricing has become an ever quickening race to the bottom.

Exactly. The problem is, as quality rises, the motivation for people to "contribute on a creative level" drops because the amount of work required increases, and so does the risk of failure. We can't prevent that happening, so instead, SL may need to actually add new subsystems to let consumers experience growth.



Not just that, but that the consumer experience on SL is very bad at delivering any "vision" or growth. As a consumer, you can't "earn" a different experience on SL, because - as SL is a social world - your SL experience is greatly governed by how other people treat you and most people will not let you "earn" their treatment in the way of your choice.

I didn't intend "10,000" to be understood literally. A content creator could spend time to make something new and turn a profit, even if the price of each copy is low, by selling to 500 people. Or even 100. The numbers would vary with the time spent, and the price (even if we stipulate that the price remains 'low').

And what about this would keep SL creators from continuing to innovate? If you are trying to make the argument that low pricing would prevent innovation, I think you have a ways to go.

You seem to be saying that quality = 'amount of work' put in.

But in my experience, quality also derives from creativity and imagination.

To equate quality with 'hours of effort' seems to be leaving out something very important.

No, because then the ability to grow would have been restricted in another way.

Yes, the question of how you can allow each individual to experience growth without the whole world growing to eliminate the value of the "low end" is a colossal one. For other MMORPGs, their answer was grinding, and even that didn't work for some cases (Star Wars Galaxies, for example - for many of the inter-player trade professions, like dancing, you were either a Master or you were only ever used out of sympathy, because there were enough Masters to satisfy all available demand). SL, so far, has ducked the question. But I believe soon, that SL is going to have to come up with an answer.

Quality derives from creativity, imagination, talent and effort.

However, over time, people with the highest levels of all these traits take up the top spot and fulfill 90% of interest in the world. You can join them, but not if any of those traits are lacking.

It's like being the class brain, or the class athlete or musician in school - it feels like an easy ride if you're talented, because your talent is all you need to be recognized in that small environment. But when you leave school and step into the wide world, there are so many people just as (or more) talented that effort has become the tie-breaker, and that pleasurable easy ride is gone forever.

That's what's happening to SL. The days when you could just be inspired to use the build tools and create something that would sell are disappearing in most markets. Now, that just puts you in a 100-way tie with everyone else in that position, and the only way to beat the tie is hours of hard labour - ideally not handicapped by a real-life job.

The limits of the system. Depending on what you make there's only so much that's possible due to hard limits imposed by the SL platform. Skins are a perfect example. There's really no room left to innovate there because the limitations of the platform are fixed, as is the range of styles that will generate consumer interest. Substantial changes to the platform could make that market explode again but unless that happens it will continue to operate on the law of diminishing returns.