Funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant and seeking to analyze the merits of virtual worlds for research applications and controlled experiments, researchers with the Synthetic Worlds Initiative (SWI) at Indiana University Bloomington conducted a study which found that gamers in fantasy-based online worlds conformed to the Law of Demand, which states that increasing the price of a good, all else equal, will reduce the quantity demanded.

For the experiment, two identical virtual worlds (Arden) were created with players randomly assigned to one or the other. The only difference in the two environments was the price of a single good, a health potion, which was priced twice as high in the experimental world than in the control.

Players in the experimental condition purchased 43.1% fewer of the potions, well within the range one expects for normal economic agents. According to SWI, this can be taken as evidence that the Law of Demand holds in fantasy environments, suggesting in turn that fantasy gamers could potentially be economically normal despite skepticism due to abnormal fantasy-themed environment.

According to the paper in which these results were published, A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science, this testing in general behavior theory could lead towards further explorations on virtual worlds' viability as social science Petri dihes: "It may be worthwhile to conduct controlled economic and social experiments in virtual worlds at greater scales of both population (thousands of users) and time (many months)."