The economic theory of natural resource exploitation predicts that scarcity crises will not arise because forward-looking resource owners will smooth their extraction over time to maximize their profits. The model providing this result can seem opaque and technical to students, but its intuition can be learned from experience. The author shares a…

A novel game that captures the central dimensions of climate change mitigation as a social dilemma is presented. Students play the role of countries sharing a global atmosphere. In each round, carbon emissions are released and accumulated in the atmosphere, making climate change consequences more severe and difficult to mitigate over time. Without…

There is a well-known connection between the barriers to entry created by an overburdensome regulatory climate and lower levels of productivity that create less economic growth. Many economics students are under the impression that regulations are designed to protect the workers and consumers as well as improve product quality, so they are often…

The Alchian Maze uses active learning for teaching important economic concepts like spontaneous order and the power of profit and loss. While the game is an effective teaching tool, it is also cheap, low tech, and requires little advance preparation. The author of this article provides an overview on how to create and run an Alchian Maze. A number…

The authors of this article studied the effects of game-based financial education approaches using a sample of lower-secondary school students in Finland. The sample consisted of 640 students from 42 schools in different areas of the country. The authors focused on three different game-based interventions using a pre- and post-intervention survey…

In this article, the author describes the structure and content of a video game that she developed for a hybrid principles of microeconomics course that consists of two 50-minute lectures and a 50-minute online portion per week. The game comprises seven modules, each of which was assigned to be played during the course of the semester for the…

The author of this article describes a game-theory-based economics class on how people should, and do, form beliefs, communicate, and make decisions under uncertainty. Topics include Bayesian and non-Bayesian belief updating, the value of information, communication games, advertising, political media, and social learning. The only prerequisite is…

The authors adapted a lab-in-the-field experiment emulating the dynamic extraction of a fishery to create a Web-based classroom experiment. The game includes a multi-player version analogous to an open-access problem and a single-player version analogous to the social planner problem. This game is helpful in introductory microeconomics courses to…