INTRODUCTION
In Fall 2023, I was using an online platform, known as the MobLab, to conduct class experiments and economic games in my ECON489 Game Theory class. This kept students engaged in active learning. Navigation was easy, as students could use either their laptop or phone to join the games. Overall, I had a very positive experience using the platform.
IMPLEMENTATION
In Game Theory, there are abstract concepts such as the Nash Equilibrium which students may find it challenging to understand. Instead of beginning each class with theory and letting students play the “games” afterwards, I adopted a different approach.
Often times, without showing the game theoretic predictions, I let students play the “games” first. We then discussed the results during class right after. The next step was to learn the theoretical predictions, and I asked students to reflect why the results could differ.
At the end of the semester, my students wrote a paper on the game that they thought was the most interesting. They compared our class outcomes with the theoretical predictions. I also encouraged them to explore the literature on other experimental evidence.
Examples
Here I am going to show a few games that are easy to understand for a general audience.
(1) Dictator Game
Students were paired in groups of two. We played a one-shot game where in each group, one student acted as the Proposer/ the Dictator. They would decide how much out of $100 to share with another player.
In our class, many “Dictator” students chose to offer an amount higher than $0.
Theoretically, a “fully rational” Dictator should offer to share $0 to the other party to maximize their payoff. When being asked why $0 was not chosen, many students answered that they thought it would be “unfair to the other student”. This shows that altruism and fairness can play a significant role apart from rational payoff-maximization. This happens especially when we played the game in a community where students knew each other in the class.
(2) Ultimatum Game
This game was played after the Dictator game to gain further insights into the incentives of proposers. In the Dictator game, all payoffs were decided by the Dictators, so there was no strategic element in what the Dictator should propose.
Here in the Ultimatum game, the Proposer gave a proposal of how the $100 should be shared. The Responder could choose either to accept or to reject. If the Responder accepted, the payoffs would be realized as what were indicated in the proposal. If the Responder rejected the offer, both would get $0. Therefore, a Proposer now had to worry that a Responder would reject an offer if it was deemed too low.
In theory, a Responder would be indifferent between accepting and rejecting an offer of $0, and they should accept any offers greater than $0. We played 5 rounds of the game. Consistently, we saw that it was common for offers greater than $0 to be rejected. This showed that Responders might not only care about the payoffs but also if the Proposer was making “unfair” offers. Also, Proposers tended to offer a positive amount, often higher than $30. This is consistent with two conditions: (1) altruism and fairness might be valued by the Proposers, and (2) Proposers anticipated that low offers could be rejected.
(3) Rock Paper Scissors
What is the winning strategy of playing rock-paper-scissors? Or does it even exist? Standard game theoretical predictions would say one should play each strategy exactly 1/3 of the time. However, in our class, we found that male students tended to play rock most of the time.
In our class, we had 5 male students, and 2 female students.
Note: R, P, and S stand for Rock, Paper, and Scissors respectively in the graph above.
This is consistent with some existing experimental studies that male participants tend to play rock. I encourage you to do a Google Scholar search on this topic!
CONCLUSION
Overall, I would say that I had a very good experience with incorporating MobLab in my class. I can see that many of my students appreciated the chance to have interactive activities. Using an online platform made it possible to show real-time visualization of data we collected in the games. It helped tremendously as we could discuss the game results immediately without waiting for time-consuming data collection and analysis after class time. I appreciate this opportunity to incorporate digital pedagogy in my class. I look forward to more of these opportunities in the future.
