The authors present a classroom experiment designed to illustrate key concepts of third-degree price discrimination. By participating as buyers and sellers, students actively learn (1) how group pricing differs from uniform pricing,(2) how resale between buyers limits a seller's ability to price...

We present a simple classroom principal-agent experiment that can effectively be used as a teaching device to introduce important concepts of organizational economics and contracting. In a first part, students take the role of a principal and design a contract that consists of a fixed payment...

We present a simple classroom principal-agent experiment that can effectively be used as a teaching device to introduce important concepts of organizational economics and contracting. In a first part, students take the role of a principal and design a contract that consists of a fixed payment...

We present a simple classroom principal-agent experiment that can effectively be used as a teaching device to introduce important concepts of organizational economics and contracting. In a first part, students take the role of a principal and design a contract that consists of a fixed payment...

The introduction of the concept of network effects is useful at the principles level to facilitate discussions of the determinants of monopoly, the need for standards in high-tech industries, and the general complexity of real-world competition. The author describes a demonstration and an...

The authors’ aim in this article was to show how the use of classroom experiments may be a good pedagogical tool to teach the Nash equilibrium (NE) concept. The basic game is a version of the beauty contest game (BCG), a simple guessing game in which repetition lets students react to...

This classroom exercise illustrates the Tiebout (1956) hypothesis that residential sorting across multiple jurisdictions leads to a more efficient allocation of local public goods. The exercise places students with heterogeneous preferences over a public good into a single classroom community. A...

Edward Chamberlin, who initiated classroom market experiments, used the results of these experiments to argue that competitive equilibrium performs poorly in explaining the outcomes of real markets. Vernon Smith altered the design of Chamberlin's experiment to increase the amount of price...

Edward Chamberlin conjectured that the number of trades in realistic trading systems is likely to exceed that predicted by competitive equilibrium theory. He supported this conjecture by data from a large number of classroom experiments and with a plausible argument based on a numerical example....

The authors describe a classroom experiment that motivates student understanding of behavior toward risk and its effect on money demand. In this experiment, students are endowed with an income stream that they can allocate between a risk-free fund and a risky fund. Changes in volatility are...