1. A Classroom Game for Developing Market Demand and Demand Elasticities: The Snicker Effect

This simple experiment of market demand has students create their own individual demand curves based on principles of consumer choice and then has them combine to create a market demand curve. The experiment further introduces students to the various types of elasticity associated with the demand curve; price elasticity of demand, income elasticity, and cross-price elasticity. Students are asked to hypothetically "buy" from a "store" in the classroom where product price and income change throughout the different stages of the experiment. The students are grouped and develop market demand curves for various products from which elasticities are then calculated. Including a 5 minute introduction, and a 5-10 minute concluding discussion, this experiment fits into a 50 minute class period. The author has used it in her introductory microeconomics course, with class sizes ranging from 20 to 70. [Details...]

2. Experimental Derivation of a Demand Curve

Most of the concepts presented in Principles of Microeconomics are particularly abstract to the average introductory student. This "Coke game" is designed to bring life to a few of these concepts so that students will better understand and retain important principles. Further, the active nature of the game provides a very welcome variation to the usual lecture format. The following concepts are introduced through the use of this experiment: law of demand and the "ceteris paribus" assumption, consumer surplus, competitive equilibrium and pareto optimality, and monopoly power and profits. Since students are using their own money to purchase Cokes, the message being sent is particularly powerful [Details...]

3. The Construction and Identification of Demand Curves: A Concerted Experiment for Principles Instructor and Dining Services

Demand curves are one of two key ingredients of the economist's totem--supply and demand analysis. Their identification and construction are notoriously difficult, especially as regards classroom instruction. More recently, several authors (De Young 1993, Ortmann and Colander 1995; Neral and Ray 1995; Delemeester and Neral 1995; Brauer 1995) have used classroom experiments to illustrate concepts related to supply and demand analysis. Classroom experiments allow for a far-reaching control of the environment. This strength of traditional (classroom) experiments is also its biggest weakness. In a sense, the induced environments are too controlled, thereby tidying up the inevitable messiness of research, and making the identification problem disappear.1 This has led some instructors to simple in-classroom construction and evaluation of production and cost functions (Neral and Ray 1995) that do not use the induced value approach typical for traditional (classroom) experiments. Here we report a simple complementary semester-long experiment involving the construction and identification of demand curves in a college environment. [Details...]

4. Using Student Data to Teach Utility Maximizing Behavior

The primary goal of this experiment is to introduce students to the utility maximizing rule and to convince them that whether individuals know anything about economic principles or not they will act to maximize their utility subject to constraints in each of their purchases or activities. [Details...]