Pollution, Taxes and Permits Game

[Anke Leroux]

First of all, thank you for providing this great resource, that is classEx. This is a fantastic initiative to introduce more experiments into classrooms everywhere.

I recently ran the Pollution, Taxes and Permits Game with my class. I had 38 participants (each participant was in fact a group of students because my class has an enrolment of 170). Some things didn't quite go to plan:

1) in one of the Pigouvian tax rounds the same buyer ID appeared twice in the list of coal transactions, i.e. the same buyer bought two units of coal or two participants were given the same buyer ID

2) Even though I had specified secret permit codes and the correct number of paper permits to be distributed in the parameters section of the game before starting the first round of scenario 1, sellers in the tradeable permit scenario were able to make sales without entering the secret permit code into the decision screen.

3) Not a glitch but any advice would be appreciated: I incentivize positive profits in the game but in a classroom setting it is difficult to disincentivize negative profits. This encourages some participants to sabotage the game by accepting offers that yield high losses for these participants. I don't think these trades are a mistake as they happen in consecutive rounds.

I would love to hear if anyone else has experienced any of these challenges and how I may go about fixing them before my next class.

Many thanks,

A Leroux

[nicolas...@economics-games.com]

For 3) Why not announce that there is a participation bonus that can be lost in case of negative profits (and keep the exact amount secret)?

Another challenge I experience quite often (in other games) is participants who focus mostly on having the best "score" rather than maximizing their payoff, hence being much too agressive (a way to alleviate this problem is to separate participants in two different games, and to explain that the final ranking for the classroom will depend only on the participants' payoff, not on the 'internal' ranking in each game. Insisting that the best player of a very "agressive" game may very well end up quite low in the final ranking)