Applications of SMS in Laboratory Experimentation and Classroom-Teaching: The Gaming Version

The gaming version of SMS is a special type of simulation in which human participants act as decision makers in place of the REA..subroutines within the, otherwise unchanged, system being simulated. This construction allows SMS to be utilized as a highly motivating tool in classroom-teaching of the theory of imperfect information and learning, monopolistic competition, market processes and other related topics. Moreover, the gaming version can be used for experimentation purposes. As already mentioned, the learning and adapting behavior of the test persons takes place under conditions identical to those used in exploring the various experimentally programmed behavioral models in simulation. Hence observed time series in each case are directly comparable. The synthetically generated performance can be confronted with that of the human participants so as to make empirical evaluations possible.