Shared Resources

Small Group Activities for Intermediate Micro

For our Intermediate Microeconomic Theory course, we have developed several small group activities, some of which would also be appropriate for an introductory microeconomics course. Development of these activities was paid for through an NSF-sponsored Team-Based Learning project, and they are currently hosted on the Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics site.

Price Elasticity of Demand
Teams are given a list of goods and asked to identify what they think are the most elastic and least elastic.
The Value of Car Insurance
Teams identify the factors that affect the decision to purchase car insurance.
Food Trucks in the Short Run and the Long Run
Teams forecast the profitability of a food truck business in the long run, ideally taking into account the roles of their cost structure, potential market entry, and regulation.
Welfare Loss from Monopoly
Students are presented with several potential markets and asked to consider the welfare consequences of monopoly power in each.
Nonlinear Budget Constraints
Teams graph both linear and nonlinear budget constraints and identify optimal choices for consumers with different preferences.
Big Players in a Small Market
In the context of an oligopolistic entry game, students will translate a word problem into game theoretic notation and will then examine how changes to the payoff structure changes the Nash equilibria in a game. They will also solve for and discuss the Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies.
Location Choice for a Small Business
Students will discuss the location choice of a small business and how this choice determines the market structures in which the business would have to operate. Students will discuss how a profit-maximizing firm would behave in each of the three locations and what would be the resulting outcome in terms of revenue and profits. The...
Keeping Each Other in Check
Students will examine the behavior of two large oligopolists, deciding on which factors serve as the biggest deterrents to the firms' collusion. The main factor preventing collusion is the temptation to deviate from the agreement for both firms, which leads the Nash equilibrium in which both firms do not cooperate.
Shutdown Decisions
Students will discuss full and partial shutdown decisions in a context of a small business (bagel shop) which, with the advent of cold weather, considers closing its patio, keeping it open and putting up heating lamps, or closing altogether for the months of November through March. The exercise starts with a conceptual-level discussion and continues...
Smoking and Vaping in New York
Students will examine the welfare effects of a tax increase in a market with negative externalities in the context of the New York City tobacco and e-cigarette market. The exercise offers a more challenging setting than traditional single-market-focused examples by having the students consider a related market for a substitute (e-cigarettes) and two groups of...