As an economics instructor, you're always looking for innovative and effective ways to engage your students and help them develop a deeper understanding of economic concepts. One game that can be particularly effective for teaching price discrimination and monopoly is MobLab's Price Discrimination game.
Brief Game Screen of the Price Discrimination Treatment
This game is a simulation of a market in which a single student has monopoly power and is able to price discriminate. Your students will step into the shoes of a pharmaceutical company and experience the challenges and opportunities of operating in a market with such power.
Find the Price Discrimination Game in our Library!
What's more, the game is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor it to your specific learning objectives of the class. You can adjust the game settings to focus on specific aspects of price discrimination and monopoly, such as the elasticity of demand or the degree of market power. This means you can customize the game to take students from a Single Market Monopolist, into a Mixed-Market, and finally, into a Price Discriminating Monopoly.
Price discrimination configurations allow you to set demand, marginal costs, and the market type.
But the best part of MobLab's Price Discrimination & Monopoly game is its interactivity. Your students will make strategic decisions in real time, experiencing the thrill of competition and the excitement of trying to outwit their opponents. This makes for an engaging and immersive experience that will deepen their understanding of price discrimination and monopoly dynamics.
And once the game is over, you'll have access to a wealth of data on the prices and quantities sold by the students. This data can be used to test different theories and hypotheses, and to provide feedback to players on their performance. It's a great way to help your students understand the real-world applications of the concepts they've learned in class.
Check out our recent blogs on debriefing students after the experiment:
When the results screen loads, the summary table will appear at the top of the page. This table includes round-by-round information on the number of observations, treatment condition (e.g. price discrimination or not), the fraction of students that chose the optimal quantity/quantities, average profit, and average consumer surplus.
The graphical results are divided into panels: single market monopolist, mixed market monopolist, and price discriminating monopolist. Once the panel is open, at the top you will see two standard monopoly graphs with quantity on the x-axis and price on the y-axis. Demand, marginal revenue, and marginal cost information are displayed for each market. The median market quantity and price for each round are marked as an "x" on the corresponding demand curve.
The price discriminating monopolist condition also has two frequency histograms below the graphs, one for each market.
Research has shown that using games like MobLab's Price Discrimination & Monopoly game in economics education can be highly effective in promoting learning and retention. It's a well-designed and well-researched tool that has been shown to be effective in improving students' understanding of price discrimination and monopoly. And don't worry if you're new to game theory or economics education - the platform is easy to use and comes with extensive resources and support.
Add some excitement to your economics class and try MobLab's Price Discrimination & Monopoly game today. Your students will thank you for it!