What can you do with a B.A. in Econ?

Make awesome video games even more awesome, that's what. Valve's hiring another economist:

Economist

Valve’s multi-player games, as well as Steam (Valve’s successful trading platform), have allowed for the spontaneous emergence of complex virtual, yet quite real, economies. These economies are replete with rich trading patterns, fascinating ‘institutions’ (which have also sprung up organically), socio-economic conventions, and, generally, a host of economic phenomena that partly reflect what we observe in the analogue world and partly constitute new and unexplored behavioural patterns.

The task of a Valve economist is to make good use of the incredible wealth of data concerning these social economies, to pose fresh questions about their workings, and to generate methods for converting new knowledge about these economic vistas into tangible ideas that help improve our customers’ experiences.

Duties:

• Research, design, develop, and validate economic models to explain user behavior for all of Valve’s products.
• Design experiments to validate experimental hypotheses for in-game economies.
• Provide insight into short- and long-term behavioral patterns of participants in virtual economies.
• Inform decision-making at Valve by providing quantitative and economic rationale for various lines of inquiry.
• Create new avenues of analysis based on existing economic metrics, as well as generating new domains of data to collect and investigate.
• Collaborate with our business development team to improve the performance of existing pricing strategies and incentives for our customers and partners.

Requirements:

• Graduate degree in Economics or related field
• Advanced knowledge of statistics
• Four years experience with:
  • Econometrics/data-mining or related field
  • Relevant analysis techniques that inform the creation of economic models

Recommended:

• Proficiency in one or more of the following programming languages: C++, SQL, PHP, or equivalent

Apply for this position >

Now, what do I mean another economist?  Yanis Varoufakis has been working at Valve and blogged on his experience. I'm not sure if he's still there, but the blog doesn't say that he isn't. Here's Varoufakis on his first visit to Valve:

Within hours, an agreement was reached: I would become, in some capacity (that was to be hammered out later), Valve’s economist-in-residence. Valve is not the first video game company to have brought an academic economist on board (e.g. EVE Online were the first to do so, recruiting Eyjólfur Guðmundsson – whom I would like to thank for making my name sound almost easy-going…). My intention at Valve, beyond performing a great deal of data mining, experimentation, and calibration of services provided to customers on the basis of such empirical findings, is to to go one step beyond; to forge narratives and empirical knowledge that (a) transcend the border separating the ‘real’ from the digital economies, and (b) bring together lessons from the political economy of our gamers’ economies and from studying Valve’s very special (and fascinating) internal management structure.

Academia's a pretty good place. When it's working properly, it doesn't sound all that different from work at Valve, at least according to Varoufakis:

If I were asked my opinion of what Valve’s symbol should be, I would recommend a depiction of a wheel, like those which every desk at Valve comes equipped with so as to enable us to move about the company at will, to join whichever working group we want, to form new ones spontaneously and without seeking anyone’s permission. The said wheel, at least in my eyes, symbolises Valve’s attempt to create, within the company, a successful ‘spontaneous order’ based not on price signals but, rather, on decentralised, individuated, time allocations.

Many enlightened corporations do a song and dance about their readiness to let employees allocate 10% or even 20% of their working time on projects of their choosing. Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing. 100% is a radical number! It means that Valve operates without a system of command. In other words, it seeks to achieve order not via fiat, command or hierarchy but, instead, spontaneously.

I wonder what Paul Walker would make of this form of organization for the knowledge-based firm. As the New York Times writes:

Mr. Newell said that there was a better chance that Valve would “disintegrate,” its independent-minded workers scattering, than that it would ever be sold.

If the firm is just a bundle of contracts....