Collaborative Research: Competitive Market Experiments for the Microeconomics

经济学(82)实验经济学对我们理解竞争性市场模型的成功和局限性做出了重大贡献，也展示了个体卖家和买家之间的互动如何产生市场结果。努力改进本科生微观经济学课程的一个重要目标是开发学生使用的市场经济中的价格和分配模型。参与市场实验的学生直接体验了卖家和买家之间的互动。他们看到，在许多市场环境中，这些因素如何导致有效的配置和稳定的市场价格。智力价值在过去的4年里，互联网可访问的市场实验已经发展起来，这些实验证明了竞争市场的微观经济模型中的关键概念。在这些实验中，学生们在市场上以卖家或买家的身份相互作用。作为一个群体，他们的决策和行动决定了价格和交换数量，他们产生的结果通常与竞争均衡模型的预测密切相关。这种类型的练习对学生的学习产生了实质性的积极影响。在实验中实施市场模型使模型变得有形，这有助于学生理解模型的要素，并增加他们对模型的相关性和预测能力的信心。在目前的提案中，我们正在努力扩大实验范围，将长期均衡模型--微观经济学课程中的关键模型之一--包括在内，然后将该模型应用于税收和监管问题。有了这些补充，“Econport”上可用的实验将包括本科生微观经济学课程中教授的所有核心市场模型。Econport是通过国家STEM数字图书馆提供的资源。更广泛的影响我们开发的市场试验有很多优势。因为它们是基于互联网的实验，所以它们具有广泛的可访问性，并且独立于计算平台。因为它们是经过编译的程序，所以它们快速、可靠，并且支持定制的用户界面。这些特点的选择是为了让没有专门经济学实验室的高校--或者有经济学实验室但没有市场实验软件的高校--能够将这些实验纳入本科微观经济学课程。我们的期望是，这种市场实验的方法将扩大到任何学生可以接入互联网的机构，现在包括美国的大多数本科课程。由于未来的实验是由相对较少的进行市场实验研究的机构的教师开发的，因此可以迅速向本科教师提供这些实验。

Economics (82) Experimental economics has contributed significantly to our understanding of the successes and limitations of models of competitive markets, and has also demonstrated how interactions among individual sellers and buyers generate market outcomes. An important goal of efforts to improve the undergraduate microeconomics curriculum is to develop student-use models of prices and allocations in a market economy. Students who participate in market experiments directly experience interactions among sellers and buyers. They see how these lead, in many market settings, to efficient allocations and stable market prices. Intellectual MeritOver the past 4 years, internet accessible market experiments that demonstrate key concepts from microeconomic models of competitive markets have been developed. In these experiments, students interact with one another as sellers or buyers in a market. As a group, their decisions and actions determine prices and exchange quantities, and the outcomes that they generate typically correspond closely to the predictions of the competitive equilibrium model. This type of exercise has had a substantially positive impact on students' learning. Implementation of a market model in an experiment makes the model tangible, which facilitates students' understanding of the model's elements and increases their confidence in the relevance and predictive capability of the model. In the current proposal we are working to extend the experiments to include the long-run equilibrium model - one of the key models in the microeconomics curriculum - and then to apply the model to problems in taxation and regulation. With these additions, the experiments available on "Econport" will include all of the core market models taught in the undergraduate microeconomics curriculum. Econport is a resource available through the National STEM Digital Library. Broader ImpactThe market experiments that we have developed have many advantages. Because they are internet based experiments, they are widely accessible and independent of computing platform. Because they are compiled programs, they are fast, reliable, and support a customized user interface. These characteristics have been selected so that colleges and universities that do not have a dedicated economics laboratory - or that have an economics laboratory but do not have market experiment software - will be able to incorporate these experiments into the undergraduate microeconomics curriculum. Our expectation is that this approach to market experiments will broaden access to these experiments to any institution where students have internet access, which now includes most if not all undergraduate programs in the U.S. As future experiments are developed by faculty in the relatively small number of institutions that conduct research on market experiments, they can be made quickly available to undergraduate instructors.