Economics-Games project is led by Nicolas Gruyer and Nicolas Toublanc.
Nicolas Gruyer specialized in Economics after aeronautical engineering studies at ISAE Sup’Aero. After completing a PhD in Economics at the University of Toulouse 1 (now known as Toulouse School of Economics), he worked as an economics professor at ENAC (french Civil Aviation National School) for 10 years. During this period, he taught Microeconomics, Industrial Organization and Business Games at ENAC and Air Transport Economics at TSE, and an important part of his teachings was based on economic experiments and games. Since 2012 he is creating games for teaching economics (projects economics-games.com and airECONsim).
Nicolas Toublanc worked for 11 years in software development on web and industrial projects (Airbus, SNCF, Nespresso, …). Freelance since 2011, he is responsible for the technical development of projects economics-games.com and airECONsim.
Two projects, short (free) multiplayer Economics Games and longer Industrial Organization Games
Our project can be separated in two branches:
The first, economics-games.com, is a website with free multiplayer classroom games for teaching economics. These are short games designed to be used directly inside the classroom to illustrate microeconomics or game theory notions. The site is kept as simple as possible to make it possible to create games within seconds (no installation, no registration: create a game in a few clicks, receive logins and passwords to communicate to your students, direct them to a shortcut, simu.io, and the game can start).
In addition to this, we are also working on longer industrial organization games, designed for trainings over several days (through distance or traditional learning).
The first of these games, airECONsim, is based on the air transport industry. Players are responsible for managing the fleet and the pricing policy of virtual companies competing over the same routes, and must adapt their strategies to a constantly changing environment (crises, airport congestion and regulatory changes, emergence of environmental constraints, development of a new aircraft, cost evolutions, new route openings …).
We have also developed two new games, for teaching energy economics or environmental economics and carbon permits markets.
These games are kept as simple as possible, to be able to add more complex scenarios over them and still keep the maximum visibility over economics issues. These games can be used to introduce most of the subjects of an intermediate industrial organization course (demand and cost shocks, monopoly/oligopoly, collusion, barriers to entry, differentiation, price discrimination, mergers, auctions, switching costs, R&D, strategic interaction and game theory… ).
And a few other projects…
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