Behavioural And Experimental Economics Workshop Day -1
On Friday, the 25th of February 2021, a group of 60 excited students joined the Behavioural and Experimental Economics workshop- the beloved good ol’ annual workshop conducted by Ashish Sir and Savita Kulkarni Ma’am for BSc students. The session started with Ashish Sir giving us a background about the subject matter and what to look forward to in the three sessions of this workshop.
Without much ado, we started off the workshop and the first game which we played (https://www.getbadnews.com/#intro) was titled “Bad news” and this game was followed by another game called “Go viral”
(https://www.goviralgame.com/en/). Both these games delved into the concept of misinformation on social media. How is fake news created to emotionally attack people, how does it lead to polarisation, discredibility in the society and how does this fuel the creation of conspiracy, impersonation and trolling- were the issues explained by these games.
After learning about these vital issues, we moved on to play the “Double Oral Auction game” (link- https://kiviq.us/info). We played four rounds of this game and were fascinated by the results of each round! We were assigned the roles of buyers and sellers and had to make a buying/selling bid. If the bid was accepted by the seller, the buyer could go on to bid for the next unit. If the bid didn’t get accepted for some time, you could change your bid. In the initial round (played for approximately 10 mins, 20 units were transacted, allowed losses with warnings), we had a market efficiency of 83.92%, total earnings of $6146 and the possible earnings were predicted at $7324. In the second round (played for 7 mins, 5 units were transacted, allowed losses with warnings), we had a market efficiency of 69.35%, total earnings of $2290 and possible earnings were predicted at $3302. In the third round (played for 5 mins, losses prohibited and 5 units were transacted), we had a market efficiency of 95.84%, total earnings of $3043 and the possible earnings were predicted at $3175.
After this round, we took a slight detour and touched upon behavioural finance. We spoke about GameStop Corp (whose shares doubled in afternoon trading on 24th Feb, surprising those who thought the video game retailer’s stock price would stabilize after a fierce rally and steep dive that upended Wall Street in January). We were given this hint- a frog emoji tweeted by Ryan Cohen featuring a McD Smoothie. The tweet referred to the MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) index and the frog jump which is the indicator of how the MCAD indicator shows the bullishness of a particular stock.
Finally, we moved on to play the fourth and the last round of the Double Oral Auction game (Played for 5 mins, loss notifications were prohibited and 20 units were traded) . We had a market efficiency of 90.29%, total earnings of $9183 and possible earnings were predicted at $10171.
After taking a look at the results, we concluded this session with the tradition of 5 random questions.