WP5 Online economic game In this work package an on-line role playing game will be created in which players can take on different roles and observe simulated economic outcomes. The game will use the underlying platform of the agent-based model as its core economic engine, to perform all the budgetary calculations, set prices, and implement constraints as needed. The only difference is that some of the decisions will be made by real people rather than computer algorithms. In this sense this work package is closely related to WP4. Missing players (making decisions that are not the focus of the game) will be supplied by algorithms as needed, based on the rest of our work.

 

One purpose of this game will be to collect data on decision-making. Unlike with human experiments, an on-line game can potentially be implemented on a much larger scale with less overhead. Such games could potentially involve hundreds of participants from around the world (for implementation feasibility reasons we will not be able to have more than a few hundred participants at a time, at least in this project).

A second purpose of the game will be as a tool to build intuition about economics – a minor variation of the on-line game will be usable as a role-playing game with small groups of players, who could for example be a group of policy makers. Such a game could raise public awareness of economics, which could aid in the dissemination of results while also increasing public understanding.

 

The objectives of WP5 are the following:

• to create and run an on-line economic game in which players at different geographic locations can engage in role playing and observe the collective outcome of their actions through the internet;

• to create a version of the same game, in which players are in the same location, to be used by policy makers;

• to use the data collected from this game to better understand economic decision making;

• to increase public awareness of nonlinear feedback effects in economics.