The global market for virtual items, characters and currencies was estimated to exceed 2.1 Billion USD in 2007. Selling virtual goods for real money is an increasingly common revenue model not only for online games and virtual worlds, but for social networking sites and other mainstream online services as well. What drives consumer spending on virtual items is an increasingly relevant question,...

Virtual Worlds have become serious business models and thus gained the attention of law professionals. The legal problems arising out of Virtual Worlds have started a discussion which will be summarized in this article. Moreover arguments will be delivered which can be used to protect users of those Virtual Realities.

This study provides a deep understanding of the current status of electronic networks in the Jordanian handicrafts sector from managers’ perspectives. More specifically, this study enhances utilisation of the e-environment to gain market share in local, regional, and international markets. Four cases of handicraft projects are selected to conduct face to face interviews. The results show that h...

Industry revenue for online games is surging. A unique phenomenon in this market is the significant volume of trade among game users, who exchange real money for virtual goods that do not exist in the real world. The market of virtual goods has two distinctive characteristics: 1) the resold virtual items normally involve no quality loss since the attributes are digitally defined, and 2) the gam...

We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible items to players having additive utility functions over the items. We consider allocations in which no player envies the bundle of items allocated to the other players too much. We present a simple proof that deterministic truthful allocations do not minimize envy by characterizing the truthful mechanisms for two players and two items. Als...

In this account of the history of voting-power measurement, we confine ourselves to the concept of a priori voting power. We show how the concept was re-invented several times and how the circumstances in which it was reinvented led to conceptual confusion as to the true meaning of what is being measured. In particular, power-as-influence was conflated with value in the sense of transferable ut...

extended abstract 1. introduction knowledge-based cultural industries are among new economic opportunities for all countries in the 21st century. cultural industries are parts of economics of new knowledge. governments promote measures that lead to the support and development of cultural industries. creative industries have 13 subsets and handicraft is one of them. this article investigates the...

Traditional Knowledge (TK) is essentially culturally oriented or culturally based, and it is integral to the cultural identity of the social group in which it operates and is preserved. “Traditional knowledge” is an open-ended way to refer to tradition-based literary, artistic or scientific works; performances; inventions; scientific discoveries; designs; marks, names and symbols; undisclosed i...