Moneymakers and bartering in online games

We study the interpersonal trade network from a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), where players actively engage in the exchange and sales of goods and items in a hyperrealistic virtual environment. In this paper we introduce the concept of Standard Price (SP) of items computed from the trade network, which allows us to investigate the relation between the profitability of a trade and the structure of the social networks of the users. We find that the social network is correlated with the outcome of interpersonal trades. For instance, we observe that the margin of profit in a trade correlates with the social distance between trading partners, suggesting that social affinity implies shared information on the value of an item.