Part 1: Let the Econ Festivities begin!!!
Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune held its annual Econ Fest ‘MANAN’ from 11th to 13th February. Read on to follow up with all the exciting things that happened during the fest!
MANAN ‘22 Games
Let’s Get Fiscal (Siya Sharma, FYBSc 2021-2024)
This event involved a preliminary round that happened on 10th March. It involved 17 teams who had to answer a total of 10 questions. For every right answer, the team got 6 billion dollars and lost 1 billion dollars for every hint they got. The total amount they won in the prelims was the budget they had for the final round. Out of 17, 6 teams with the highest budgets got selected. In the main event, each team was given one country and 90 minutes to prepare the budget for that country keeping in mind certain terms and conditions. They also received extra points if they opted to trade with other countries. It was interesting to see the pitches that the teams made to other countries. At the end of 90 minutes, the teams were given a surprise element. They had to spin a wheel containing 11 different situations based on which the participants had to make amendments to the budgets in 30 minutes. Some of these situations were: natural disaster hits the country, potential war, FDI enters the country, revised taxation policy and so on.
At the end of these 30 minutes, the teams were required to join a video call and present the budget in front of the judges.
Results:
Bhavya and Ayush representing the budget of Germany stole the first prize. Shubham and Riya representing Japan’s budget were the first runner-ups while Naini, Kashika and Yash representing Australia’s budget were the second runner-ups.
The NFT Troopers (Padmaja Uttarwar,FYBSc 2021-2024)
The NFT Troopers was an event organized around the concept of trading in the metaverse. The main objective of this was to increase the awareness and understanding of NFT trading and the potential it carries.
The event was carried out on a separate discord server and it spanned over two phases. Phase 1 consisted of the preliminary round conducted on 10th March in which all the 32 teams had to answer a set of 25 questions and the teams (of two people each) with the most number of points would progress to the final round. Phase 2 comprised the final round and was held on 12th March. It involved 4 rounds of auctions which were regulated by the bidding and trading rules. At the start of the game, each team was given 1500 ether for buying the NFTs. The first round began with the auction of NFT bags and the highest bidding team won the particular NFT bag in that round. After this round, there were 3 more rounds of auctions. In between these rounds there were trading sessions where the participant could buy and sell their NFTs for ether. At regular intervals during the game, a news bulletin was released which fluctuated the price of the NFTs, making the game more dynamic and the participants trade wisely.
Results:
After consistently and wisely bidding for the auctions and carrying out the trade, first position was bagged by team Rohit Potdar and Neel Dhar, followed by the team of Faizul Haq and Mayank Hooda as the first runners-up was and, last but not the least, the second runners up were team Vibhor and Kanishq Mishra.
Stratathon (Mrunmayee Joshi, FYBSc 2021-2024)
‘Stratathon’ was organized by MANAN and The Indian Game Theory Society on Friday, 11th March 2022 as a four hour online event based on the concept of Game Theory. With a total of 8 people competing for an exciting cash prize, the event started off with a trial round to give a sense of how the games are to be played and how the rules work, the ‘Diner’s game’ where a total of three rounds were played in which each person was allowed to place an order in the range Rs.0 – Rs. 250, both inclusive, but only in multiples of 10. The real competition then began. The first round was ‘Unique Bid Auction’ played across 3 rounds. In each round, teams had to bid integers between 1 and 30, both inclusive. Prize money and points were awarded on the uniqueness of the bid. After the round 4 players were eliminated and 4 players progressed.
The second round, called ‘Trinity Tic Tac Toe’, was played between 2 players simultaneously on three tic tac toe boards, with a coin toss deciding which player will get to go first. The game had lots of twists and turns, and had to be played with attention paid to the unique rules. At the end of the game, 2 players were eliminated with only the final 2 players remaining.
The final round, christened ‘Black Hole’, had to be played on a grid of 21 hexagonal boxes and ultimately decided who the winner of the 2 players still standing would be.
Results:
The first place was bagged by Rishi Goswami and the runner up was Lucky Wamankar, followed by Rishav Kothari.
The MANAN Quiz (Jatin Kulkarni, FYBSc 2021-2024)
No econ-fest is complete without a quiz. The MANAN quiz was a two round online event conducted on 13th March. The quiz master for the event was Nakul Haridas. The first round had 22 questions which the participants attempted to qualify for the second round. The questions hailed from Economics and Geopolitics to….required the participants to have economic, geo-political, general and historical knowledge. There was a wide variety of questions, ranging from picking the odd one out from pictures of historical personalities to finding the inaccuracies in geo-political images which kept the participants on their toes.
Results:
After making it to the second round, the participants battled it out until Preetham Updhyay emerged as the winner of the event.
Lights, Camera, Auction! (Wani Deoras, FYBSc 2021-2024)
The event was just as interesting as its name! Lights, Camera, Auction! Was an auction in which the participants were to bid on 15 different industries like Coffee industry, gaming, textile, iron and steel and so on. The game was played in 4 quarters. The base price of all industries was declared before the bidding started and bids were to be made in multiples of 100 crore. Every team had 30 seconds to bid higher than the last highest bid and the industry would then be allotted to the team whose bid was active at the end.
The teams were also required to bid within the given budget constraint and had to be careful of their profits and losses in each quarter as this would affect their final financial position to be used to arrive at the result.
To blow some steam off the tense bidding environment, Team MANAN also put out fun riddles, the correct answers to which would earn bonus points for the teams. These points too would be considered while calculating the result.
Results:
After a tough bidding war that went on for hours, the first prize was bagged by Manna Chaudhari and Aaskash Singh, second by Sourabh Nair who was followed by Srijay Raj at the third position.
With the exception of a few technical glitches that have now become a part of all online events, this one-of-a-kind, enthralling event was a huge success!
–Team Econcordia (FY 2021-2024)