Fdownload
Externalities
MobLab Game: Externalities with Policy Intervention
Key Teaching Points:
- Show a divergence between market price and quantity and the socially optimal price and quantity for an externality-generating good.
- Demonstrate that taxes and subsidies help individuals to internalize these externalities.
- Explore tradable permit market for a good with a negative externality.
Common-Pool Resources
MobLab Game: Commons: Fishery
Key Teaching Points:
- Set group size equal to one or many to reveal property rights as the fundamental issue of the commons.
- Individual profit maximization leads to overuse of a common-pool resource.
- With communication individuals can form non-binding agreements about governing the commons and administer verbal punishments to violators.
- Indefinite repetition increases the stream of future benefits from cooperation and may lead to more cooperative outcomes.
MobLab Game: Tragedy of the Commons
Key Teaching Points:
- An individual's utility maximizing catch has an interior optimum.
- Since fish in a public lake are a common resource, each individual has an incentive to overfish (i.e., not take into account the cost imposed on other group members).
- Regulations, such as taxes or subsidies, can mitigate the over-use of natural resources.
MobLab Game: Commons: Fishery with Quota
Key Teaching Points:
- An individual's utility maximizing catch has an interior optimum.
- A quota can improve player outcomes relative to open access, both by allowing the recovery of a renewal resource and by preventing over-exploitation of a healthy stock.
- Explore the effects of different quota allocation schemes (e.g. historical, capacity based, or equal) on the health of the fish stock.
Public Goods and Free Riding
MobLab Game: Public Goods: Linear
Key Teaching Points:
- Highlights the features of public goods: non-rival and non-excludable.
- Shows the tension between individual and group welfare.
- Experience the free-rider problem.
Contingent Valuation
MobLab Game: Blank Survey
Key Teaching Points:
- Create your own survey-based experiment on contingent valuation using our Blank Survey tool. You can create different frames to elicit student WTP and WTA for non-market goods.
Risk and Uncertainty
MobLab Game: Bomb Risk Game
Key Teaching Points:
- Individuals differ in their risk tolerance. Risk preferences displayed in one environment can carry over to other environments.
- Individuals who open fewer than 50 boxes can be said to be risk averse. Those who open more can be said to be risk seeking.
Additional Risk Preference Surveys: Risk Preferences: Holt Laury and Risk MobLab Survey: Ambiguity Aversion
Key Teaching Points:
- Compare situations of risk and uncertainty to aid in a discussion on the precautionary principle.
- Show that individuals exhibit a preference for known rather than unknown risks.
Time Preferences
MobLab Surveys: Time Preferences: Binary Choice (and Budget Sets)
Key Teaching Points:
- Explore time preferences and elicit individuals willingness to tradeoff between present and future consumption.
- Likely show time inconsistent preferences where individuals exhibit different willingness to tradeoff between present and future at different points in time.