Game Economist Cast
What does the new wave of open economies mean for monetization? Will negative externalities overcome cosmetics economies in the long run? What exactly does a game economist do?
Game Economist Cast is a roundtable discussion of the latest developments in mobile, HD, and crypto games through a bunch of people figuring it out using the economic tool kit.
Game Economist Cast
E25: The Veblen Goods Model That Explains Web3 (w/Dr.Sam Rosen)
Dr. Sam Rosen of Temple University finally unleashes the Veblen Goods model for which every Game Economist yearns. We discuss:
- Why don't sold-out artists raise ticket prices?
- Why do NFT projects go boom or bust?
- Should auction-based goods mask demand for their products?
- What types of Pokémon are optimal for collecting in Go?
Dr.Rosen's paper, co-authored with Dr.Anthony Lee Zhang & Sebeom Oh, is out now!
Let's start with utility. I don't understand what it even means.
Speaker 2:Everybody has some kind of utils in their head that they're calibrating.
Speaker 3:There's hardly anything that hasn't been used for money.
Speaker 1:In fact, there may be a fundamental problem in modeling that we don't want to model.
Speaker 3:Our guest today is Dr Rosen from Temple University. You're one of the authors of Digital Velvet Goods, which is a deceptively simple title, but I love how straightforward it is. We're happy to have you here.
Speaker 1:I'm very happy to be here as well, and, yeah, I'm an assistant professor of finance at Temple University. I've been here for a little over five and a half years, I think, or maybe come up on six years, where I like doing research on digital assets. And, yeah, I think I'd like to work on more projects.
Speaker 2:Sam, we like to jump into things, but to explain a Veblen good. And then some of the main highlights.
Speaker 1:I think maybe to summarize, we take a look at the NFT market. We find it to be this fascinating environment where we have this massive growth and increased valuations. We propose that you should view NFT goods as Veblen goods and I think the easiest way to think about Veblen goods you could think about them like any sort of good that has a large social aspect to their value, where you like this good, in part because other people either want it or desire it, and it's the type of good that actually poses some problems. For I'll call it classical economics, which I'll get to in a moment. But yeah, it's luxury watches, nightclubs, really popular restaurants, things that seem to people want to go to them more, want to be part of them, because other people value them, and one of the things that makes them puzzling is classical economics.
Speaker 1:You look at a market like that and you just say why not just raise prices?
Speaker 1:Right, if you have a restaurant where you have a line out the door, a nightclub with a line down the street, you think, just raise prices, we'll get supply, equal demand and everything will be good.
Speaker 1:And essentially our paper builds off the intuition developed by an Omar Classic paper and economics by Gary Becker that basically made the argument that when you have a good with a social component to it, demand can be really fragile and as an issuer or as the business, you basically run the risk of, if you try to increase prices, you could end up in a bad equilibrium where suddenly your good is no longer cool or suddenly out of favor, and that's a very bad outcome, right?
Speaker 1:So there's this basically intentional mispricing or underpricing that creates this gap between supply and demand. And so in our case, we take that initial framework, we make some I say, technical changes to it, in part to remove this multiple, to have a uniquely equilibrium in our setting, and ultimately we use this framework to say if you have a good with a social component to it, there's three things you predict out of it. You'd have basically a very bimodal primary market where you either have successes or failures with this type of good. You're going to see this systematic underpricing in the primary market price and then also the prediction that you'll see this large class of scalpers emerge to take advantage of that underpricing. And so we have this framework, we give these predictions and then we show that this is exactly what we find in the NFT market and that's how we're able to ultimately argue that NFTs represent these types of devlin goods.
Speaker 3:So you referenced Becker's note on restaurants. Do you mind just talking a little bit about that Only because I think all of us here I don't know if we call us Beckerites, but we work in games yeah, becker's like our boy, oh yeah, I'm impressed you, yeah, you guys know this paper.
Speaker 1:I guess I'd say it was one that I actually didn't know. I guess they probably were working on this paper. He's got too many good classic bangers out there, but it's a really interesting paper because it's from the early 90s. It's actually, I think, and it's super well-written and interesting, where he tells these kind of little anecdotes, for example even, I think, calls out his wife at one point and says oh, you were there working at a restaurant and his wife there was an empty one. She said I don't want to eat in that empty restaurant where no one else is. And it just raised this question of why do these exist? Why don't they?
Speaker 1:Hot restaurants raise their prices and it's been a little more of a loose framework. It shows that, basically, if you can imagine a good where there's parts of the demand curve, where it's upward sloping, you can replicate these types of outputs. And it's got these really nice diagrams in this paper that basically show oh, there's multiple equilibrium, which is a part of the problem for making a more formal analysis. But yes, if you just raise the prices enough, suddenly you're no longer at this good equilibrium, you fall to this one where your demand collapses, and I think that intuition is super powerful and, I think, makes a lot of sense and something that, yeah, can help explain this type of good in practice.
Speaker 4:You made a comment in your paper. You're like yeah, I think we're the first people to actually measure like a Veblen good or this social effect, and to me it seems the ability of all the data on the blockchain was what enabled you to do that. And I'm wondering if there's other of these like classic economics questions that you don't have a ton of data for that crypto might enable further research into.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly our angle here and with some of those questions, I believe that they definitely are out there and I think that's one reason why, even when the younger PhD students and such are asking for topics, I encourage them to at least consider blockchain-based assets, in part because I think, yeah, the opportunities are there where, if they were so obvious to people, they would have maybe already written papers. But I still think, yeah, it's just a matter of trying to find the right questions and, yeah, with the Veblen good thing, it was something that was not obvious to us at first. It revealed itself over time, especially as we learned more about the industry and the assets themselves. I think there's a huge learning curve, even once you think you have all the data and the answers, in terms of actually understanding what you're working.
Speaker 3:Do you hold any financial assets in crypto yourself as a part of your financial portfolio?
Speaker 1:I do, and I think this started with the ICO project because, at least personally, I feel like when I present a paper on these topics, I can't be a complete fraud in terms of going up there and telling people about this topic that I have literally no experience in. So back even in the ICO days, I set up a digital wallet. I even participated in some ICOs because, even though sometimes this is more of a narrative part of things, you want to explain how do you actually participate in these sales and how NFT launches. You actually want to do it for yourself and see what it looks like on your end as a user. And then, I'd say, also talk to people who are in the space as well. And actually I've probably learned the most about NFTs from talking with people who trade and invest in NFTs. Some of it's my own personal experience clicking the buttons and actually going through the motions, but then also just understanding from people who actually do it how they're thinking about this market.
Speaker 3:Any Web3 games.
Speaker 1:There, I do not, so I know this is a game podcast.
Speaker 2:Can't blame you there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and on that side of things, I'm actually looking forward more to hearing things from your end about what's going on more of the gaming side and how NFTs are being involved. I feel like I can imagine what's been going on, and maybe I guess I'd say I've read things about how people would like to use NFTs more in the gaming space, but it's all kind of very theoretical to me in this respect.
Speaker 3:What do you think is going on? What would be your guess?
Speaker 1:My guess and actually yeah, you can correct me if I'm wrong about my general impression is that NFTs are being used in gaming to give more of the kind of power and ownership back to people in the games where I know there's a lot of these kind of online and call them essentially metaverse games, where you can own items or own stakes in the environment, but they're ultimately controlled by some sort of central company or manager where at least a complaint from gamers could be oh you changed the rules of the game or you can just take items back from me or ban me from the accounts, and that at least NFT giving the ownership of digital assets to the people in an immutable way at least changes that relationship where I could see how that would be beneficial from a gaming perspective, because then it's a little less of the company and the environment telling you how to play, but more kind of a two-way street, given that people could take their digital assets and go into different environments.
Speaker 2:That's very accurate in terms of why these types of gamers, these Web3 gamers, care about Web3 or blockchain, and in fact, it's similar to we had another guest on, dr Io Gudmundsson, who's out of Iceland. He's like an OG video game economist and he had a very similar answer to you when we asked him what's the most valuable part of blockchain to gaming, and he said this immutability, this uniqueness and this kind of security, which I think all of us were taken aback by that. That was not what we expected, but the more I think about it, the more I actually think that is true. But anyway, Really.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I have a hard. Take the other direction, dude, I have a hard.
Speaker 2:Take the other direction. Dude, we'll have to talk another podcast. Guys, we don't want to fight in front of Sam. No, we should.
Speaker 1:I don't want. Yeah, I'd be open to that. I'm interested. One thing actually, you mentioned if I play in any game or metaverse type of games, the one thing that maybe gives me a little bit of credit in this space although I think maybe you'll laugh after I say what it is I to go pretty seriously for a while and I think that's at least one example where I guess it's a whether we are owning digital assets, your Pokemon there.
Speaker 1:When they introduced trading and stuff, you had to be close to someone to do it and such, but of course you had to follow the rules of this careful environment and that would be a very different experience if it was. You caught Pokemon in the game but then they're ultimately in your own digital wallet where you know preparing for today or you're thinking about some of the questions you sent over. I kept trying to say, oh, is this a good thing or a bad thing? And ultimately I came out with the idea that it's just a different experience where you could see a benefit of having company controlling the rules and setting everything's up and taking care of bad actors and whatever, but then you could also see a benefit to having more freedom and actually incentivizing the gaming company itself to want to keep people in their environment and to design things in such a way where yet they won't. They don't want to because they could leave with their digital assets.
Speaker 4:They're not going to I think what you described about ownership and immutability is often a common marketing narrative that games use.
Speaker 4:But in practicality, it seems to me that, first, these individuals have very little control over the actual game itself and, like at the end of the day, they're trying to ride on the whole decentralization of Ethereum and Bitcoin and all that.
Speaker 4:But at the end of the day, the game server is run by a small company and if they shut it down, it's shut down. There's no like actual player control over that. And in practice, what I see a lot of is people just basically replacing classic game microtransactions things you could buy in a game, like a hat or a gun or like a costume with NFTs and letting people trade those on secondary markets. And because they're tradable on a secondary market, the initial price is often much, much higher. And then the other big theme I see is there's some kind of financial return, like the assets function like capital somehow, where they allow you to earn play to earn. They allow you to earn some kind of currency faster by having a either a stronger gun that kills stuff faster, or maybe it just straight up gives you like a percentage rev share, yeah, and so that's, I think, there.
Speaker 1:You have to worry about the unregistered securities when you start sharing cash flows with people but another financialization angle is actually really interesting, and you asked about what experience I have purchasing or dealing with nfts and one of the ones I did buy early on was just like one of the characters in the sandbox game.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, I just thought, okay, first of all I was just playing around an open sea and such, but then, as far as the transaction, I'm like, hey, I'm, I don't know if I'm ever going to play this game, I don't know if that's going to be something I'm interested in, but I'm affected if we allow to bet and invest on the success of the game as a whole by owning a small digital piece of it, where that's interesting to allow speculators in.
Speaker 1:But then, even if you're in the game and such you mentioned, oh, you can get items and they ultimately have some sort of resale value. There's at least some incentive from the user perspective to want to see the game succeed, in part because now they have this financial stake in it. As far as the assets they've built up where once again, I don't know if that necessarily makes the game more fun or not I could see it maybe taking away from some of the fun of it, but at the same time it at least offers something so here you said you wanted to bet on sandbox right, by buying the nft.
Speaker 3:So here's what I can't figure out why is there not more like nft funds? Right, Because you don't want to bet on the characteristics of the NFT, because who knows if the NFT is going to matter in the sandbox or not. It could be a piece of shit. Right, Like you didn't buy the one with the right stats and the stats matter. So why aren't there more people like bundling these things together?
Speaker 1:And I want to invest in a it's what a token is right it of whether or not more experienced traders or I guess let's just call them yeah, let's say more experienced traders could actually just earn positive returns trading in the NFT space where this is in terms of maybe some of the way we always set up our research questions as a little more of a classic appeal where there's lots of markets where you think that more skilled investors, things like venture capital or even investing in the real estate market or other markets we have all these distinct assets and then maybe there's some sort of skill where even let's call it informational advantage just allows you to earn higher returns and that's actually how we initially interpret their results.
Speaker 1:But to get back to the specific point you mentioned, one of the reasons why we motivated this types of questions is just that, hey, if you want to get access to the NFT market as an investor, there are no kind of large indexes you can invest in. I think part of the reason is just essentially transaction costs, where you'd have to put together a large portfolio, market cap weighted, and trading in the NFT space, including royalty payments and other things about rebalancing your portfolio, just make it actually expensive to do that Really? The only thing you could do is pick your own set of T's to gain exposure to the asset class, and that's one reason why we thought, hey, this is a place where you could see a lot of differences in performance based on the fact that's really your only way to get into the space. Now it turned out that's not at all. We ended up realizing that wasn't how to explain our results in the first place, but that was our initial thought of why at least that type of question was worth exploring in the FTA space.
Speaker 2:So the high skill traders basically ended up turning into like the scalpers in your model yeah, in fact yeah, I think old versions are available and such.
Speaker 1:It's not like we're trying to hide the previous versions. But yeah, that's exactly what happened was they turned into scalpers because we realized that's actually what they are, right? We had this kind of whole progression where we saw that they were earning higher returns and we're like, wow, look at this smart money. And we were able to identify them based on their trading behavior and in that sense, the story was almost a little bit boring. I'm like, oh, the smart crypto traders just outperformed the dumb ones and people were okay to believe that, but at the same time, it ultimately wasn't that interesting. And I think when the paper really moved to the next phases, when we figured out that, ultimately, the strategy those experienced investors were following was nothing more than taking advantage of this I want to call it inefficiency, because that's actually not how we show it, but taking advantage of this premium that just is sitting there in this primary market that, ultimately, our paper argues is thereby construction.
Speaker 2:Interesting, and did you come to that?
Speaker 4:conclusion, scalping conclusion, but like through interviews or like, how did you realize that it was?
Speaker 1:I feel, like a little bit slow over time where, I think, probably within the data, that was when we first figured out that at least you could explain away all of their outperformance, of these experienced traders, just by controlling for whether or not they're trading in the primary market. And we just realized that those experienced traders, that's just what they do, they trade a lot more in the primary market. And then we could even see that they joined sales market. And we just realized that those experienced traders, that's just what they do, they trade a lot more in the primary market. And then we could even see that they joined sales later and we said, okay, they're just following this type of strategy.
Speaker 1:But in terms of, I think, ultimately seeing it for a little more what it is and putting it more in context of what our NFTs, as these digital assets, it was really putting together. Sometimes research papers will put in these theoretical frameworks to help rationalize the results or something, but I think our paper really adds a lot of value because, yeah, the point is, you don't get these types of results unless you understand there's this social component of these goods and I think once we put those pieces together and saw it as part of a larger picture. That's when we realized that this could tell us more about what NFTs are as digital assets, not just explain an individual result.
Speaker 3:Is there any relationship between networking effects and velvet goods?
Speaker 1:Networking. I think they're similar in the aspect that I guess, within a lot of cryptocurrency right, there's this idea that, oh, you get more people on your network and it's an accelerator effect, if you will, that the more people that want to be on it. So in that sense, yeah, I do think there is a similarity there in terms of if you view that as demand for a cryptocurrency and then you want to own the cryptocurrency other people want to demand. Yeah, I think there's definitely a very similar.
Speaker 3:So I bought Taylor Swift tickets here in Stockholm against my better judgment for my wife and I was going through your paper and I was thinking about those Taylor Swift tickets and one of the examples we always give of Elvin Goods is concert tickets and so I think for someone like Taylor Swift, who probably has a good sense of her demand curve and also she's going to consecutive cities, that she would have a better idea of what demand would be for her good. Why doesn't she use auctions?
Speaker 1:It's a good question where in some sense I trust Taylor Swift and maybe her team to. They've thought through these options and at least they've picked the one that they think optimizes whatever outcomes they're looking for. But I think and I guess I'd say here's maybe I'll segue the one way where I think NFTs could be valuable. I think with one thing about concerts and those types of experiences, you always hear about artists not wanting to alienate or kind of push away their real fans to some extent, and definitely these days you hear it a lot more, given how expensive concert tickets are, that oh, so much. For this one no one can afford to go and I think in some sense people have just accepted that these big acts are going to have this. But I think the idea is that artists recognize maybe they're pushing at the upper end of really how much they can charge and still be seen as artists for the people in some sense.
Speaker 1:And I've seen the argument that NFTs can be maybe part of the solution to these types of problems because there's a way to create I'll call it some credible digital evidence that you are a real Taylor Swift fan, right when, I think even our paper.
Speaker 1:We have scalpers in there who have no utility from owning the good, don't want to be part of the community, but they're just there to profit off of this mispricing.
Speaker 1:That's a huge problem in concerts as well, and I think that it was the prospect of NFT technology to maybe somehow separate individuals in these types of purchasing games and allow them to get people who actually can demonstrate that oh, I've been to previous Taylor Swift concerts to people who actually can demonstrate that, oh, I've been to previous Taylor Swift concerts, oh, I've actually done things that kind of show a degree of fandom, and not just things you can purchase to allow them to maybe get earlier access or cheaper prices or something. And so I guess all this is to say that it may be I don't know if I'd call that an auction type of outcome but an outcome where you have tiered pricing based on some sort of digital wallet or ability to show Taylor Swift fandom. I could see that being an innovation that ultimately arises, but maybe it's just a little early to see those types of things, and so for now, we're in the second best world of charge a pretty high price, but not one too high to really alienate everybody.
Speaker 4:So one thing you note in your paper is that under your model there's no equilibrium if there's an auction or some kind of dynamic pricing. But in practice right now we see a lot of NFT projects trying this sort of thing and I'm curious if you think. Obviously the model says no, but are there tiered pricing or auction type formats that could capture more value for the NFT creators?
Speaker 1:Here's something where I'll definitely admit some ignorance, where you know, a lot of times with papers I guess it's a catch up on a topic you gather a data set and you understand that data set real well. But I know that the NFT market has moved beyond the world that kind of we studied it within. So I guess I'd say in that sense we try to capture what we observed, I should say given the kind of rules and norms at the time. But just because I'd say, our framework doesn't necessarily allow or can be used to study these other types of things like auctions, I guess it doesn't mean that they couldn't work in practice, and there I would trust the real world experience and outcomes to see that I believe that they could work.
Speaker 1:It's just, in some sense, whether or not other aspects change as well. Where I think something that started to change towards the end of our sample was, I guess I'd say, specific and deliberate changes to the way NFT collections were sold that actually tried to sidestep scalpers or tried to limit especially you had to change the Ethereum network with gas costs that also during the early period, gas was a huge issue and something that was a problem for many primary market issuances. I guess the long story short is. I would certainly believe that other alternative sale mechanisms could work, but I guess at this point I haven't really thought too deeply about them.
Speaker 2:You mentioned, one of the main results of the model is this like bimodal equilibrium where, like you're either in the in equilibrium or the out equilibrium and from my understanding it all hinges on rho, which is like the social parameter. Like how strong are the social effects for this Veblen good? Could you explain? I really love that. Could you explain that for the listeners? These indifference points are always really cool in economics and I kind of love getting into them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:As far as the setup here, you have a utility function where you say, all right, how much do I value owning this good? And in our setup we take a pretty simplistic view that there's some sort of fundamental value for owning this good, some sort of general utility that it comes with. Where in the primary market there's some uncertainty about how good it's going to be, that generates yeah, there's just some kind of fundamental aspect there. But then there's this other component which basically just says and I care about how much other people wanted to be part of this? And the way we represent that is, you have this row parameter that we just assume is a positive number and it multiplies into a variable that represents how many people actually demanded this good in the primary market sale. And if you think about it conceptually, this is, I think, intuitive but also an interesting idea that how much I enjoy this good, the actual return I get and the utility sense depends also on how many other people were waiting in line at the same time or wanted to jump in on this sale. And this row parameter, therefore, is obviously plays a crucial part where you could say the extreme in our setting is what if this value was zero. And then you're back in this classical world where you mentioned, or one of our results is that if you have social component, if that value is positive, you should see bimodal outcomes in the primary market either see success or fail. So that's one extreme right. And then as long as that number is sufficiently positive, then you should. I'm sorry, if it's zero, you would not see these types of bimodal outcomes. You'd basically see more of a smooth outcome that's more based around that fundamental insert.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting question of whether or not this is something that's say heterogeneous across collections and to the degree. That's even time-varying. But I think the short answer would be that the more weight you put on that part of the utility, the more Veblen-ness of the good you'd expect to show up in practice. And maybe that's too obvious of an answer there, but I think all these things we associate with Veblen goods, you're basically just putting more weight on that social component. It increases the instability of things as well, because if you think about this overall demand being this coordination game problem of everyone trying to decide whether or not this is a cool collection or not, whether or not this is going to be a community we want to be a part of. You're just putting more and more weight on just that particular aspect of a collection which, I think, essentially magnifies these types of things that we observe.
Speaker 3:So you talk about these bimodal outcomes and if I'm an NFT collection creator, I'm going to read this paper and I'm going to be like I need to sell out. And, by the way, when I work with clients I work with a lot of web3 clients they all know, which is very interesting. They have an intuitive sense of the bimodal outcomes, so you don't even need to say they act as if they really do know about these outcomes. So why not go negative on price? I want to drum up as much hype as possible. So I'm thinking I want to max out my marketing budget. Need to make sure I sell out. That's really important.
Speaker 3:So I want to set marketing budget maybe higher than I might otherwise set it. Because of this. I'd want to perhaps do negative price. I don't know Negative price bonding curves. I'm looking into that. I'm thinking about that. Probably the last thing I'm thinking about, which I'd love to learn more about from you, is I want to send my own people out into the field and have them sell out and buy my own shit. Make it look like it's sold out. Was there any evidence of deception or wash trading or any shenanigans in the data set?
Speaker 1:Isn't that the right behavior to do? Yeah, so no, I think that's a fantastic question and observation and actually on that I'll start with the end point there. My colleague co-author on the paper, sebam he actually has another paper on FTs where that's specifically what he looks at is wash trading activity, so I'll give his paper a little bit of a plug. Now that you would think that, hey, in this type of environment where you have this social component of goods and you have people respond, or you think, respond to demand you think wash trading should be super prevalent. And I think that's the kind of notion you think and I think also something you talk to. People in practice assume that there's some degree of that. And essentially I'll say that his results, at least on the wash trading side, basically find that there's not a lot of. First of all, if you try to quantify, it's actually maybe smaller than a lot of people would think, perhaps given the incentives that are out there. But I think another super interesting thing he finds is that also, it doesn't really seem to work, where I think the explanation is that when you have the ability to study the blockchain and look at the record of transactions deliberately manipulative trading, of trying to purchase things at elevated prices or basically create a false sense of demand actually don't translate into price increases the way we see I'll call more fundamental demand actually does, because one this is a less of a focus of our paper now, but in previous versions we did have kind of collection level secondary market price results where you could see obvious things that people in the industry know when you talk to them more trading is leads to higher prices in the collection and so totally you think, oh yes, let's do this fake trading or something right, like any way we can boost our demand. But at least when you look at the more kind of clear manipulative trading, yeah, there's basically no market response to that, which I think is interesting.
Speaker 1:And then you can ask maybe what's some other reasons? I think part of it too is just that it's expensive to wash trade in the NFT market. You have royalties, you have gas costs, you have the time of our collections cost. You have the time of our collections. You also had OpenSea charging 2.5%. So I think that's what partly makes it an unprofitable strategy and actually the wash trading that maybe you're aware of, that kind of did occur and is a little bit of an open knowledge in the NFT space, what happened on the LookSpare exchange or these exchanges that basically, through their own marketplace design, incentivized wash trading.
Speaker 1:But the point is people weren't doing it to necessarily pump up the value of collections, they were just doing it to maximize these trading rewards. Essentially and I'd say that essentially those marketplaces figured out quickly that they saw this behavior. We actually have to drop all of those transactions because we know they're fake. But the point is that, yeah, they don't have at least the effect of just being able to prop up failed collections or really make people believe this is actually a collection people care about.
Speaker 2:Regarding methodology, could you explain how you determined the difference between a scalper and a non-scalper, because that was one of the critical. Maybe you could call it an assumption.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it is a label we apply and I gave the backstory that previously we just called them experienced traders, and that maybe more directly shows how we identified them, which is just that we so in previous versions, where we essentially had the same group of traders, we just recognized that there was a large or not, sorry, a small set of wallets that do an outsized portion of the trading, and earlier I was talking about how we also noticed that these traders that happen to trade a lot also seem to earn higher returns, and that was where we thought, oh, maybe there's skill or experience or information or something like that. But essentially all we were doing is trying to take what we thought was a pretty simple, simple, observable trade on the blockchain was just how much did you trade prior to the given date? Right, we always kept things ex-ante, in the sense that we'd always look historically and that was our kind of sorting criteria where we'd done some work on things that are ultimately in the paper that this relationship's effectively monotone, where you can see that any of this behavior and such increases in the amount of trading that you're doing, and then fast forward to the current version of the paper, where we're essentially calling them scalpers right now, and we actually, I think, have a footnote in the paper where we try to explain this, especially someone who's maybe seen the previous version or something where our point was that you could, when we're looking, this model predicts that there should be scalpers right. They should just come out of an emergent phenomenon that we're going to have these traders come out and take advantage of that.
Speaker 1:You see it with concert tickets, you see it everywhere. It's just somehow. They see these opportunities. They just they come out and find them. And the question is all right, if you want to find them on the blockchain, yes, you could just look directly for that behavior and then call those types of trades are higher returns. It's a little too much just finding what we're trying to define. So we actually thought it was very convenient that this previous trade that we thought was associated with the information of it actually it's not defined based on the activity we're looking for, and then that actually was a nice coincidence.
Speaker 2:The power of being able to see everything that somebody's ever done. Now this is complicated with multi-accounting, but it's really incredible, just the fit down. You still need an identification model, but you almost don't need an identification model.
Speaker 1:With the amount of. Yeah, it's true, it makes things easier in some sense, and you mentioned, obviously, the problem with that. People can use multiple accounts, right, and this is something I learned a lot from talking with NFT investors and traders that I know that it was. People tell me that, hey, I'm not using my main wallet when I'm going to buy these mints, given the risks and concerns and such, and we understand that behavior is out there. We could probably spend months really trying to create clusters of wallets and such, and I know that maybe some other papers have done this. But the nice thing about that, I'll say, those types of issues is, if anything, those work against us right, because, especially when you think, oh, should you consider our scalper dummy, what we call it now, right, if these type of behavior is super prevalent, this is things that just buy us away from finding these types of results. At least, it's not significant enough to yet completely hide that.
Speaker 3:So you dunk on these scalpers quite a bit, and if I'm a member of the general populace, I'm rooting you on. But if I've had a little bit of neoclassical trading, it's oh, scalpers are great, right? They're doing what the original NFT collection holders are not, which is that they're properly rationing and allocating goods. So why are you so negative on them? They seem to be doing something very positive here. They're allocating goods efficiently. What's wrong with them?
Speaker 1:It's fair enough that it is easy to basically just completely trash on them, where I think you look at anyone else in the equation, but the creator, maybe the people who are there truly for the community, right, yeah, that these people are here just for the profits, although I'll agree with your point that, hey, this is a market that is, these are the rules of the game.
Speaker 1:They're, they're not doing anything wrong from that perspective, and you could also argue that maybe they're providing kind of short-term liquidity, right, they are taking, are taking some risk of buying into a collection, even if they come in right at the end to just try to get the last one.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I guess in that perspective, yeah, I don't think it's maybe fair to call them completely negative, but I guess where you could argue, or at least make the more general point that they're at least not good in a welfare sense, is just that this type of competition, especially when you have a market where you had these large transaction costs and gas fees, basically a lot of the kind of rents and benefits from these collections essentially get dissipated through these types of transaction costs and to the extent that you have these types of traders that are increasing those negative externalities or maybe that negative external is not the right word overall deadweight loss of the process, then in that perspective they are creating aggregate harm.
Speaker 1:But I think the solution is not necessarily to shame them or to say that what they're doing wrong. It's to say, hey, they're here, they're doing what's in their own best interest. How can we redesign things to maybe mitigate their impact? And I think that's where you did see the NFT space ultimately go, as they figured out how much of a problem these types of scalpers were for their launches.
Speaker 4:I thought Chris had an interesting observation where so in your model, you've got a few key components. One was the row, which is how the strength of the social effects, and one was theta, which is information on the quality or the intrinsic value of the NFT. And one thing Chris observed was that if information on theta is noisier, the collection is more likely to sell out. Do you think this holds up in practice? Should NFT projects try to make it harder to tell how popular the project is and try to increase that variance so that they can sell out more reliably?
Speaker 1:So I think the problem so I think you're right with the logic and understanding, and I think part of this comes down to one more broad finance term you could think of that's related to this is, with options, right, With stock options, anything you increase volatility that increases the value of options because you also have a higher chance of these higher payoffs.
Speaker 1:And so I think it's similar here, although I think we have to be careful in terms of how we think about what does it actually mean to increase the variance in theta, where I think there's kind of two ways to do it.
Speaker 1:One is some way that essentially increases the upside, but then there's also I guess it's a decreases to the mean of it, where I think, when you think about what collections do pre-launch right, Because I think earlier I think we got a little bit off topic from this but you're saying, oh, if I was a collection, should I want to basically have negative prices? Right, Because I'm out there marketing and launch aspects, basically paying money to launch this collection that types of effort can pay off, because if you can build up and have people have a more positive view on the ultimate success of the collection, then that should increase willingness to participate as well as probability of success. And I think there's where I'm trying to draw a distinction, that you wouldn't want to not market your product at all, have people have no idea what's going on with it. But to the extent that you could keep a mean, mean zero transformation, where all you could do is push higher probability on higher states, then yeah, that would be a good thing, right.
Speaker 2:But then again, how you accomplish that in a more practical way, I'm not sure exactly what that looks like, Although theoretically right, that would seems like it would be a good thing one of the one of my favorite lines from people in my industry is and I work in web3 gaming is like the biggest disadvantage we have is that we're we've been around for three years, so you've got all these like new projects that are hitting billion dollar valuations and it's almost impossible for an established project to hit that because there's so little information. Asymmetry, yeah, so it's a funny anecdote, more than anything.
Speaker 1:No, I think that highlights how yeah you really yeah, when people know your type well enough that okay, you can see you're more bounded right. Yeah, that almost serves to your disadvantage.
Speaker 2:And that sparked the question I was like why does what's the newest Bonk? Why does Bonk get a billion dollar valuation and this other? This is the active advice, by the way.
Speaker 3:To not launch your product is the active advice that a lot of the projects I work on have been getting from their advisors. Don't launch your product. It's a bad idea. It'll hurt your token. It'll hurt your NFT prices, which has been interesting to hear.
Speaker 4:Because I guess the idea is post-launch they know exactly how big it is Whereas pre-launchunch it could be big, it could be anything your imagination has no limits how much of that is is delaying potential bad news.
Speaker 1:Right is if it's like how much of that is. We prefer not to know the answer yet because in our mind it could be better. I don't know because I guess, there has to be an eventual launch strategy, right if?
Speaker 2:you could argue it's if we put out a bad product now, then it's going to reveal that it's this low quality but that that might not be necessarily representative. Ride the hype as long as humanly possible until you release the best possible product you could release to send the strongest signal.
Speaker 1:So, actually, one collection that this reminds me of is, I don't know if you've heard of, or you're aware of, this 10K TF project. Have you ever heard of this one? Not familiar? So I believe it stands for 10,000 True Friends and it was this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was this NFT collection launch where I think it's actually very related to what we're talking about, because a big part of their launch was just maintaining this very kind of ambiguous sense of mystery about what, exactly what was coming.
Speaker 1:There is these kind of teasers of these like little clips from a movie, where it's like's going to be this launch event.
Speaker 1:And I think, yeah, and honestly, yeah, it was intriguing to me as a bystander because I knew someone who had invested in the collection and went to a lot of these events and such, where that was actually, I think, a big part of the nft space, especially with these types of collections. You talk about the utility part, and part of it, I think, was the journey and and the promise of, yeah, interesting journey that you could go on as far as even the launch of the collection, where there would be rumors about, oh, there's this event where the founder is going to be there and there's going to be this big announcement and such, and I think it feeds into a little bit of you want people that maybe like a good TV show, right. You want people coming back for more and having some high degree of anticipation where it's. How do you drop enough of that to keep them interested while not dropping too much that suddenly it's like oh, I see where this is going.
Speaker 3:So what is the difference between a velvet and good and a bubble? Can we think about those things differently?
Speaker 1:On its surface they could look very similar, and I think I mentioned this because there's, I know, another paper written by some colleagues of ours that I believe is just called like NFT bubbles or something like that, where I think part of this also takes maybe the more common viewpoint and profession that these are all just silly assets that are about to kind of crash at some point anyway.
Speaker 1:But they take some of the classic techniques of how to identify a financial bubble and how to look at it in the data, where the basic characteristics are a large run up in price and then a decline in value, and I think from an outside perspective that could be a veblen good but that also could just be a pure financial bubble.
Speaker 1:And I think in some sense it's just observationally they do look very similar and I think that's where the NFT space at least the one thing you could point to that maybe go against that type of mindset completely is there are collections that rose in value and they're still doing good, so it's, and there are similar types of assets where it's not like every single type of profile picture collection was destined to crash and burn. So that would be my argument of why these aren't bubbles in the complete sense, but then again even the kind of utility part of a lot of these NFT collections, what makes Boyd Ape, yacht Club and all these other ultimately successful collections actually still have value. Right, that fad could play out on its own as well, and then would you call it out of the bubble I don't know if I would characterize it in that way as well, but certainly you could use the same type of language where eventually everything fades away.
Speaker 2:I feel like this is a great opportunity to bring up a topic that both Eric and I are really curious about with respect to. We call it like two different types of NFTs. One is this like this speculative type of NFT, where you buy it and you hope that the price is going to go up in the future versus what in the industry you would call like a utility token, which is something that you're able to use, like you go and you take your NFT X and you actually mine up gold and then you go trade that gold on the marketplace. That more like my company's model where, yeah, we sell, we, we intentionally sell more of these. We sell as many, basically as many as people would like to buy, with no promise or intent that the value of this thing is going to go up or down. It's purchased to be used.
Speaker 2:I'm curious your thoughts on that. I know you talked about how the landscape has changed since you started writing the paper, which we should also ask how long it took to write the paper, but hard to get it, to try and get it to publish. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? I'm really curious to hear you.
Speaker 1:So actually, I think this relates to something we've touched on a few times, which is, take our kind of simple, model-based view on what a web one good is, where you have a fundamental component and you have the social component. I think what we're talking about here is essentially I don't want to say different extremes, but different weights on those aspects where I think that and I certainly understand that the use or the desire to call NFTs that serve a more clear function as utility NFTs where, oh, it's part of this game or it's got this very specific role in a certain metaverse environment, but I would at least, as I've worked on this project and my thinking has evolved, I am less apt to say that what you call speculative entities. I still think that they provide utility, but more in the sense of the social good component of it where that as much as I think.
Speaker 1:Here's also where I feel like my profession tends to not necessarily see it this way. But if you like being parts of exclusive groups and you like having access to private events and getting to know interesting people in an industry, then those aspects that are associated with, I think, more of the kind of quote speculative NFTs right, those do have real utility value. But of course this can depend on who the owner is right, where not everybody wants to go to a fest or go to these types of or you get value from going to these types of things, but if you do, then I consider that a very legitimate form of utility.
Speaker 2:I mean that's a really great point and I think a lot of people, especially outsiders, have no idea kind of the benefits of holding some of these. Especially there's some extremely exclusive groups that, like you said, you may or may not want to be involved with. Yeah, that's certainly it. No.
Speaker 1:I saw it firsthand. You mentioned about how long I've been working on the paper, for, basically, me and Sepp he was actually a first-year PhD student. It was like the opening reception here at Temple University and I was like, oh, nice to be talking to him a little bit. And then I was like, oh, by the way, I don't know if you have any interest in working on this topic, there's this thing non-fungible tokens if you'd help launch the project, and so this was like September 2021. So it was the NFT market that really started coming off, but I think certainly our profession had not really seen any work on it, and so that's really when the yeah, when we started working on the seriously gathering data, and I think it probably took us about six months to ultimately put together that first draft. But then where I think what I was getting with this is, I also went to NFT NYC that year and that was a really maybe this is not the right word, but transformative experience for me, because I got to talk to so many creators.
Speaker 1:Maybe some of the stuff I said earlier about gaming NFTs probably came from some of their marketing pitches of oh, here's how people are telling me they're going to use NFTs in their space. But even getting to see the exclusivity, even getting to tag along with some of my friends to some of these member NFT collection only events, I was like, okay, I get it, I can see why people like this, I can see why this is interesting and create value, and even just the value of the communities themselves where I've met people who were able to launch their own NFT collections, in part based on the connections they've made within the space, and how that type of community really does have more value than just a buzzword oh, you got part of the community it's. Those connections can actually pay real dividends in other ways.
Speaker 3:There are NFT collections of economists, by the way, in case you're curious.
Speaker 1:They do exist. Oh man, I haven't been invited to any of those, or I didn't hear those. Hey, you can always self-mint. You can always self-mint, and then you could do a little watch trading yeah, self-mint, you can always self-mint, and then you can do a little watch trading.
Speaker 3:If no one else is going to buy Eric, I would love to learn more about those at school. I'll send you a link after. Yeah, please do, we can corner the Gary Becker market.
Speaker 4:I'll buy one for cheap.
Speaker 2:Just buy Eric's onion coin.
Speaker 4:It's on Solana. I hold 99% of the tokens.
Speaker 1:I think that might be part of that. If this is on Solana, I feel like I have a real blind spot for Solana NFT collections. So far, I've been pretty focused on Ethereum-based for no other reason than that that's the one that I've always been able to consistently get data for.
Speaker 2:Solana has oh sorry, go ahead really good data. They have some awesome data querying websites out there that are free to use. You should definitely check it out. The way they store data is by account, so you have the state of the account over time. It's really cool. You should check it out.
Speaker 1:No, that's fantastic. Now there's a lot of as we talked about, there's so many kind of interesting ideas and things that you could build upon. I view our papers are very preliminary and hopefully helpful papers People who are interested in the space. So yeah, I think, especially as things have evolved and given more data yet there's plenty more ideas to explore.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think one of the big features on Solana is just transaction costs are a lot lower and I'm curious how does that affect the dynamics of this kind of scalping behavior where gas ate up a lot of the returns on the ETH?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think that if anything, if I just think in a very comparative, static sense lower transaction costs should help scalping behavior right. Whereas you think about people who are considering scalping, you take one kind of transaction cost down or one fewer roadblock to making a profit in those types of trades. That might more that type of activity. But actually one thing I heard recently which I thought was really interesting is I understand now that a lot of the trading has moved to the where exchange in terms of. I think I saw a chart too that really showed this kind of aggregate move away from OpenSea and kind of this 0% transaction fee exchange.
Speaker 1:And one thing that someone pointed out to me that I thought was really fascinating was just that on the Blair Exchange, apparently there's just a lot more liquidity in the sense that you have liquidity providers willing to step in and buy and sell a lot more.
Speaker 1:You have a much thicker order book and one of the things because I mentioned my paper, tim, we're talking a little bit about it he mentioned that in this kind of newer exchange and the way the markets change, maybe this aspect actually makes the kind of less like Veblen goods. Kind of less like Veblen Goods, because now you could think earlier that when you bought into collections, just knowing that you could have such a big price impact from selling, and even just the cost involved, might dissuade you and have you be more motivated by being part of this community or wanting to be invested in this collection. But having this additional ability to exit cheaper or just generally more willing buyers actually might reduce that aspect, and I thought that was an interesting idea of something that I might want to explore in the future. Perhaps, yeah, also incorporating Solana-based collections as well, because there then you also have the difference in at least the other form of trade transaction costs.
Speaker 3:And your whole paper is about NFTs, but does this apply to tokens? Is everything we're talking about in terms of album goods apply to tokens?
Speaker 1:So I don't think so and I think that the part.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I don't think so, in part because I guess we mentioned earlier that, ok, you can have network effects or you have a cryptocurrency. More people are using it. That makes it more valuable. But I guess that maybe speaks a little more to the very direct utility aspect that, okay, more people using it than the actual functionality of the blockchain or the software actually increases. So there's more of a direct point there.
Speaker 1:But I think there's something kind of very special about the non-fungible token environment where you have this clear ability to identify owners, you have a little more of a stake in actually even taking some of these collections and being a little more of a stake in actually even taking some of these collections and being part of your more of your online identity and such, and it just seems like that interacts a lot with these types of ability to make, yeah, for good, to have more of these Veblen-like qualities.
Speaker 1:I think part of that, too, is that. Okay, maybe to counteract this point, there's certainly people out there who I think, have a very large state or kind of personal stake in being very into Bitcoin or Ethereum, right, so you can see that there maybe there are these types of community or club aspects to cryptocurrencies or other fungible tokens, but it just seems like in the non-fungible environment it's just also even in a very literal sense, the ability to identify owners and holders and establish being part of a group seems a little bit more kind of salient right, and I guess that's why I probably lean against that. Yeah, but I don't know, what do you guys think you?
Speaker 4:want to shoot first. It seems to me that the model like absent the specific characteristics of a token or nft collection. Like the model seems like it all works whether the token is unit or continuous, and I think it really hinges on what you said about no one's encouraging you to put doge as your profile picture. But if you have an NFT collection you're encouraged to put that as your profile picture and they really lean in more into the. So on, the specific projects tend to lean more into that social good.
Speaker 1:If Roe is endogenous, right, is Roe increasing in these types, in the non fungible utility aspects? And I guess that's maybe what I was ultimately saying is that in order to have a significant positive role, you actually do need these things that kind of make the social component, yeah, queer, able to be, yeah, part of the actual token experience, if you will.
Speaker 4:To tie it back to games a bit. We've been talking about the social utility component and the I guess we call it functional utility or intrinsic component. And the more weight something has on the social side, the more Veblen like it is, and so I think a lot of games tend to put more weight on the functional side. So I guess, based on the project you might say, assess how Veblen like it is, and maybe that's why we don't see this behavior as much in games as we do in in like pure social, like profile picture projects.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, where I think that's intuition or that general acknowledgement I think is right, where one thing, yeah, once I'm talking with you guys, is really understanding kind of more of the game side of things and I think better than me how much effort goes into designing every aspect of the game to make it more most enjoyable, to keep people engaged and such like that.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think that the kind of Veblen side that that is you focus on and ends up being a huge part of it. I think it's always a little bit unfair that we talk about NFTs in a very kind of broad way where we're really just talking about kind of the profile picture, more socially oriented collections. But the idea is that maybe as far as this point or sorry, at this point they do seem like distinct asset classes or distinct objectives in the sense that, at least as far as I can tell or maybe even describe, I don't think the Veblen goods, the Veblen NFTs maybe I'll call them they don't necessarily have a really a gaming portion to them. It's more sometimes we joke it's like digital Ferraris or nice luxury goods or things like that, where I don't think people would describe collecting art as a game, so to speak. So maybe these really are distinct ideas, but then again, maybe they're not. Maybe they can be interwoven into the same environment. I don't know. I think maybe that's an interesting direction to think about within this space, I feel like.
Speaker 2:We've asked a few guests this question, especially since the topic has to do with blockchain web 3. What's like the? What is the cell? What's the? What is your primary value add that you see for this technology, if any at all?
Speaker 1:So it's the most boring answer and if you ask everyone else, sorry if this is the lamest answer so far, but just the the ability to prove ownership over digital assets, right, that's the thing at the core of any value chain that you could argue grows from these types of digital assets, and so it's so boring and so not interesting in some ways, but I think that's to me where I can't picture all the directions to go in. But once you're able to create these types of digital assets that provide credible ownership claims and ownership history and even can do interesting things like establish or be non-tradable, stuff like that, that seems to be where kind of everything can build off in this ecosystem, where it seems like most of the future value is going to be in terms of how NFTs quote disrupt things.
Speaker 2:It's not a boring answer and I think that's at least the second time we've gotten that as an answer and I've started to come around to that answer. But if the earlier part of the podcast, Phil and Eric were ready to chop my head off when I said that, I'm starting to agree with that.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, what's the? Where am I just being the boring? Or what's the other exciting stuff that not given enough credit to?
Speaker 3:Here's the thing you were mentioning earlier. Here's the conjure case. Right, you're like I can have ownership in the game. I can have ownership these things. There's a saying like the blockchain doesn't lie, but you can lie to the blockchain. Like the game is under no obligation to recognize an NFT. Who cares? You bought a Pokemon Go Pokemon. Okay, I'm Niantic, the maker of the game, and I choose not to recognize Snorlax or Pikachu as your NFT. Okay, done, no one gives a shit anymore. So it's a guarantee of nothing. It's a guarantee that you own something on the chain. Right, the profile picture isn't on the chain. The JPEG isn't on the chain. By and large, some blockchains have it. Okay, it's nothing then.
Speaker 3:And the other thing they do that drives me fucking nuts is that none of these games give you ownership rights or give you property rights over the NFT. They can restrict that at any point in time. There's this game, shrapnel, which is blowing up right now, and they go through the same shit. True ownership, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada can do what I want with that, and part of that, I think, is a good thing. Like Serrere, which is a French fantasy football team, you can't go out and just take your Mbappe card and put it into another NFT game. The rights restrict that you only have a right to use it on the platform, despite the fact that you own. All these things are good. It just means that the blockchain can be whatever we want it to be, and ultimately, I think that's a good thing. I just don't think these marketing promises are true, and I think all these companies know that too, and they purposely avoid that in their marketing. So I'm just I'm frustrated.
Speaker 2:But not true right now. It's like early implementation. Right, it's an early technology.
Speaker 3:In one fell swoop of a pen. All these projects can live up to their promises by saying you own property rights to your nft, and there are a few projects to do that. Crypto kitties that originally blew up did give you some property rights. Like you could reproduce the image, up to ten thousand dollars in revenue. A bunch of these games could do this, like all these card games. Why can't I take this card game and combine it with all these other card games? There's just so many things that could happen. It's composabilityability, all the shit people in Web3 always talk about. Give me the property rights to let me go do the thing that you say that this whole world is based on please, but that's why we're doing everything on-chain right.
Speaker 2:The goal is to, once we've built these programs out, to just pass them off. Players can build tools directly, interact with our programs, as long as they have the correct permissions.
Speaker 1:What prevents you saying, oh, there's no IP rights. But I guess you're saying that basically, through owning that NFT, even if you could, whether we take the token and it's in your digital wall, you can use it in some other environment. What's restricting Is it the legal system that they could sue you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let's say I want to create a game that is like a mega card game. It has all the other card games in it. I can't take a card from virtually any of these games, like Gods Unchained. So there's this company out there in Australia called Immutable. They're making a platform play. They have a game called Cards Unchained. I can own a card from Cards Unchained and I want to make a mega card game with Sky Weavers, which is another NFT project. I legally do not have the ability in the terms of service to do that. They restrict that ability.
Speaker 2:So we have players to. I'm not this isn't really a defense of Star Atlas but we players use our assets in other games that they've created many games so they literally will transfer them into the other game and interact with those programs it's all about permissions, but see, that's the whole.
Speaker 3:Conceit is that we're back to property rights. We're back to property rights and none of this is on Shane. This doesn't guarantee what people think. It guarantees it still comes through the legal system it's still.
Speaker 4:I don't think anyone's enforcing that in terms of service from God's Unchained. I don't think They'll throw tons of shit in those TOSs.
Speaker 1:I guess if it was a big enough competitor or someone else, really they're still a threat, yeah.
Speaker 3:And I guarantee you Serere would. If you used a Premier League card, I guarantee you their lawyers would be up in your shit.
Speaker 2:That's not to say that you're just. This is a critique of current application, not a critique of the technology.
Speaker 3:It's a critique of the technology, because the technology literally cannot guarantee this. The people who have the guns are the ones who guarantee this, because, ultimately, the court system is more powerful than the blockchain. So I think that's one critique. The second critique is that companies themselves haven't lived up to their promises, which they could do in the future, possibly, if they chose to possibly if they chose to.
Speaker 4:I'm going to interject a sort of middle voice here where I think all of phil's criticisms are very valid. For the current popular quote-unquote web3 games. I think sam and chris's kind of ownership take is definitely true, especially in like just basic tokens, defy and some of these very simple nft collections where it's just a yes, the jpeg is hosted on some server but you can plug it into twitter or you can plug it into a bunch of other things that verify that you own it. So I do think that there is this ownership component. But because games are a more complex beast, there's often some kind of central authority that needs to run the game or run the servers or whatever to make the nft have some kind of use. That central authority then ends up not giving property rights blah, blah, blah and blah and not really delivering on the ownership promise. But I think there's a few exceptions, like Chris with Star Atlas, like that thing actually is composable and people can build on top of it. But most of these games cannot.
Speaker 1:I think, phil, you've convinced me that the digital ownership claim is, at the very least, maybe too strong, right, I think especially?
Speaker 3:within the gaming space.
Speaker 1:Gaming space, no, I think within the gaming space I I think this is one thing I look forward to and definitely did learn is more about, yeah, how this is being viewed in the gaming space. Yeah, I think I see your point and also agree how I've in some sense just been affected mostly by the, the marketing pitches that have been thrown at me. So thank you for helping to deprogram me a little bit here what's next on the research agenda?
Speaker 1:I think there was a brief comment earlier about how you've been working on this paper and such, and I guess the long story short is we're trying to get this paper published, where I think, as you guys know, this type of stuff can take a lot longer than you might think it should. So I think that's probably my immediate focus. Also, I guess I'd say my colleague he's working on his own paper and I'm not on that paper right, but also, I think, helping him because he'll be on the job market soon enough and I think going on the market with an NFT-related paper I think is overall, I think is a good strategy, right, because it's a good area of research. It's also unique, but as far as we've talked about probably some of the ideas that I think we'd like to explore in future projects, but at this point, today has been Dr Sam Rosen of Temple University.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Sam, for coming on.
Speaker 1:This was fun and I'm going to be presenting this paper a lot more at the end of this week. I'm presenting at the Philly Fed Conference and other places, so I think that I love this type of loose conversation where I think you guys brought up a lot of things I really honestly haven't thought about until you talked about, so this has been really helpful for me as well. We should teach this to our children. Economics is major.
Speaker 4:We should teach this to our children. Economics is major. Everyone has to major in economics, number one for personal survival. Economics is major.
