Here are a few links to pedagogical resources about our free games:
Industrial Organization game: Price discrimination, vertical differentiation and peak-load pricing
Players take price and quantity decisions for an airline on a given route against a robot competitor. Illustrates notions such as marginal cost/average cost, variable cost/fixed cost, sunk cost, short-run/long-run cost, price discrimination (yield management), elasticity of demand, peak-load pricing… And eventually, players must choose whether or not to use vertical differentiation to soften competition.
- One page explaining the structure of the game and possible theoretical debriefings
- You can play a demo on the simulations page (first simulation in the list)
- You can check the companion document of the tutorial of one of our long games, which is a close variant of this game (The first four years are exactly the same).
5 short markets games
The 5 market games can be played on their own or one after the other. They are useful to introduce microeconomics notions such as sunk costs, fixed avoidale costs, marginal vs average costs, marginal revenue, monopoly and oligopoly, capacity constraints, the logic behind competition and the prisoner’s dilemma, collusion, cost pass-through, opportunity costs, short-run and long-run costs, capacity constraints, price competition and quantity precommitment… The last game also introduces simple environmental policies.
- Suggestions can be found in this Instructor’s Guide.
- Demand is the same in all of the games and is proportional to the number of players on the markets: Demand data.
- You can play a demo of the game on fixed costs and capacity constraints on the landing page of the site (orange button on the left). There is also another demo for the game introducing environmental policies.
- One page explaining the structure of this game and possible theoretical debriefings.
- Rules and presentation of the game on environmental policies and price competition with quantity precommitment.
A n-player Chicken Game
For a project to succeed, a particularly painful task must be undertaken by at least one member of a team. Team members simultaneously choose whether or not to undertake the task. If players behave according to the symetric mixed-strategy nash equilibrium of the game, the more players in the team, the less often the project succeeds.
One page explaining the structure of this game and possible theoretical debriefings.
Asymmetric Matching Pennies Game
A repeated Asymetric Zero-Sum Game which is good introduction to Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibria (this game often captures students’ attention, since while it may seem quite fair, it is in fact highly biased).
One page explaining the structure of this game and possible theoretical debriefings.
50+ other games, screenshots
- A repeated prisoner’s dilemma.
- A public good voluntary financient experiment
- A Tragedy of the Commons game based on the classic experiment created by Denise Hazlett (“A Common Property Experiment with a Renewable Resource.” Economic Inquiry, 35, October 1997, pp. 858-861, also described in the great site, games economists play , cf game #75).
.. And also cournot, stackelberg, a “battle of the sexes”, trust game, ultimatum game, trading pits, generic customizable matrix games, simulations about monopoly pricing or perfect competition …
How to use the site
- Screenshots explaining how to create and run games
- To direct your students to the login page, you can use the shortcut simu.io
Also
- Another great economics games sites: Charles holt veconlab games.
- A very interesting card game for teaching microeconomics (by Lori Alden) http://www.econoclass.com/birka.html
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