Today's virtual worlds have their own virtual economies, whether you're coughing up enough gold to buy an epic mount in World of Warcraft or converting real money to Linden dollars so you can buy realistic genitalia for your Second Life avatar. EVE Online,  wow alliance a sci-fi online game of space warfare and commerce, may have the deepest, most complex virtual economy in the world. It's so deep, in fact, that EVE Online has a chief economist, Eyjolfur Guomundsson. What do real economists think of fake economies? Guomundsson recently talked to BusinessWeek, and he had some surprising things to say.

Guomundsson has been working with EVE Online since 2004, eve isk when he was struck by the innovative idea behind the game's design ¡ª players would interact with each other to develop and trade the items they need within the game. EVE's 250,000 subscribers take part in up to one million transactions involving about 5,000 different items each day. They generate so much economic data that Guomundsson can't study it all, so he's looking for academic researchers who might be interested.

You might be wondering what the chief economist of a virtual world actually does.