Markets, Games, and Strategic Behavior

Students become fluent in economics when they can apply the concepts in a real, decision-making and strategic environment. For this reason, an increasing number of professors are incorporating experiments into their undergraduate courses.

In his new text, Charles Holt begins each chapter with a lead-off experiment designed as an organizing device to introduce economic concepts such as the Winner's Curse, Asset Market Bubbles, and Rent Seeking. These experiments are easy to facilitate in the classroom, and may be run “by hand” or online via an internet browser.

The early chapters in Part I of the text cover the basics, providing examples that feature markets with buyers and sellers, simple two-person games, and individual lottery choice decision. Professors can choose the order in which they cover later chapter topics, including markets, bargaining, public choice, auctions, individual decisions, games, and asymmetric information.