People are doing this - iirc the economist who did research on everquest for a lark, realized that the ingame economy was actually outperforming some third world countries.

Other research has continued on this as well - pretty sure game theory systems have been tested here.

Its always been a hope of mine that at some point, blizzard open sources their trading and economy data for people in the academic community.

The best labs to test human group behavior to changing incentives is probably video games. They've already established that in a world where everyone is created equal, you end up with only a small fraction cornering most of the resources/gold.