State of Play VI: Speakers' Bios

Profile

Professor Castronova is a co-founder of the Terra Nova blog and Director of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University.  He is also the Developer of Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, an MMORPG funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

Edward Castronova  obtained a B.S. in International Affairs from Georgetown University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1991. In between, he spent 18 months studying German postwar reconstruction and social policy at universities and research institutes in Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Berlin. From 1991 to 2000 he worked as an Assistant and later Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at University of Rochester. Since 2000 he has been an Associate Professor of Economics in the College of Business and Economics at California State University, Fullerton. Professor Castronova is married and has a son, his hobbies include games and theater.

• Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (University of Chicago 2005)
• Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier (2001)
  • the most-downloaded economics paper available through the Social Science Research Network
• On Virtual Economies (2002)