Public Economics

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.

Additional games include Public Goods: Discrete (Threshold) and Public Goods: Rewards and Punishment

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.

Tax Incidence

MobLab Game: Competitive Market

Key Teaching Points:

• Show that the competitive-market equilibrium maximizes total surplus (absent external costs or benefits).
• Show that taxes affect equilibrium outcomes and result in deadweight loss.
• Demonstrate the difference between who pays the tax and who bears the burden of the tax.
• Experience how who bears the burden of the tax depends on elasticities.

Public Choice

MobLab Game: Voter Turnout (Two Candidate)

Key Teaching Points:

• Explore the paradox of voting with students.
• Explore comparative statics such as the size effect, competition effect, and underdog effect.

MobLab Game: Two Candidate Election

Key Teaching Points:

• Familiarize students with the spatial model of voting.
• In the standard one-dimensional spatial voting model with two candidates, in equilibrium both candidates choose the policy most preferred by the median voter.

MobLab Game: Multilateral Bargaining

Key Teaching Points:

• Students experience coalition formation and how majority rule may lead to unequal distribution of resources.
• Demonstrate the power of the proposer.

Common-Pool Resources

MobLab Game: Commons: Fishery

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.