A Virtual Wealth Trading Model: Design and Implementation

Internet and online virtual communities have become a part of our lives. They provide us with a convenient way to maintain social relationships with other people. In a virtual community, people can earn virtual goods and virtual wealth. If virtual wealth can be transferred between different virtual communities, e-commerce will become more popular among members of different virtual communities. In order to achieve this goal, some virtual money exchange regimes have been proposed in literature. However, it is only possible under the premise that virtual communities are opened up to one another. Thus, there still exist problems for virtual communities that are open to each other. To cope with this problem, this paper will propose a novel scheme to exchange virtual wealth across different virtual communities. The proposed approach aims to provide a trade model and process between non-open communities. The details of the interactive process between the central trade system, the buyer, the seller, and the virtual communities will be addressed in this paper. In order to observe the performance of these trading processes, we designed and built a prototype of a central trade system and carried out some simulations based on it.