2006/07/01 by María Virtudes Alba Fernández, Pablo Brañas‐Garza, Francisca Jiménez Jiménez +1 · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Decision Sciences · #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #Innovations in Educational Methods #Game Theory and Applications
paper · doi:10.3200/jece.37.3.305-322
openalex publication_date 2006/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
: The authors' aim in this article was to show how the use of classroom experiments may be a good pedagogical tool to teach the Nash equilibrium (NE) concept. The basic game is a version of the beauty contest game (BCG), a simple guessing game in which repetition lets students react to other players' choices and converge iteratively to the equilibrium solution. The authors perform this experiment with undergraduate students with no previous training in game theory. After four rounds, they observe a clear decreasing tendency in the average submitted number in all groups. Thus, the findings show that by playing a repeated BCG, students quickly learn how to reach the NE solution.