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Virtual Goods in Social Media

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining

  • 57 Accesses

Synonyms

Digital goods; Virtual goods; Virtual items; Virtual products

Glossary

Digital Goods, Virtual Goods:

Digital representation of material goods available in electronic systems

Social Platform:

Electronic system supporting the building of social relations in electronic environment

Social Game:

Entertainment software targeted to players connected with social relations

Definition

Virtual goods refer to virtual objects such as items, avatar clothing, weapons, virtual furniture, currencies, characters, and tokens that commonly exist solely within variety of virtual environments such as online games and virtual worlds where they are usable. Virtual goods are a form of digital goods. Digital goods are non-physical goods (Fairfield 2005; Hamari and Keronen 2016; Hamari and Lehdonvirta 2010; Harviainen and Hamari 2015; Lehdonvirta 2009; Lehdonvirta and Castronova 2014; Hamari 2015).

Introduction

During the last decade, it was difficult to identify the economic potential of social...

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, grant no. 2016/21/B/HS4/01562.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, Poland

    Jarosław Jankowski

  2. Game Research Lab, UC Pori, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Juho Hamari

  3. UC Pori, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Juho Hamari

Authors
  1. Jarosław Jankowski
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  2. Juho Hamari
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jarosław Jankowski .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

    Reda Alhajj

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

    Jon Rokne

Section Editor information

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Management, Department of Computational Intelligence, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Wrocław, Poland

    Przemyslaw Kazienko

  2. Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Szczecin, Poland

    Jaroslaw Jankowski

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Jankowski, J., Hamari, J. (2018). Virtual Goods in Social Media. In: Alhajj, R., Rokne, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7131-2_361

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