New Technology, Same Challenge

Aside from that hard-to-grasp "industry," the article went on to describe how these activities are further being used by esteemed economists and academics to study consumer behavior, price sensitivities, and social factors that influence decision-making. The cool thing is that they can actually test different price points and conditions in real time (unlike the products!), rather than retrospectively, as is the case in most marketing research. However, the question Lyons poses at the end of his article is the core of this issue for me: how representative is the population on whom these tests are performed?

Which leads me to my usual rant about online sampling. While it is true that the Internet is fairly ubiquitous in the U.S., and even Facebook now spans at least 3 generations, this segment of people buying virtual products in virtual "worlds" seems like a fairly distinctive niche. In order to convince me that their behavior and decision-making is generalizable, these business and economic geniuses (I mean it-they are selling NOTHING to hundreds of thousands of people!) need to do companion research among people who are buying REAL things. It would have to be online purchasing (for reasons of comparison and data collection techniques), but at least that population would be more diverse. And even then, the results would apply only to online purchasing-though that is becoming much more common anyway.