Cornell University is aiming to give grad students the opportunity to explore the financial "wild west" within a completely virtual community. A new course, Professor Robert Bloomfield's Business and Oversight in Second Life, will use the virtual world to help students study business in the absence of regulation and to examine the issues surrounding all kinds of business transactions -- all within Second Life.

Second Life makes a good venue for the study of unregulated business; Cornell cites stats of $1.5 million in exchanges daily among its subscribers, along with Second Life's three stock exchanges, six banks and a real estate market -- all of which are ungoverned by fixed laws.

Cornell says the course will require students to write an analysis of any oversights or issues that they observe in this virtual world, and a series of in-world discussions will take place with guest speakers who are currently conducting business in Second Life. In addition, there will also be a number of speakers who are experts in intellectual property, e-business, regulation, and the business of the virtual world.