What Students Learn from Market Experiments
And
What They Don’t
Ryohei Haitani Sobei H. Odaz
March 2008
Abstract
This paper describes what students learn from market experiments and what they do not. The
authors taught introductory microeconomics with a series of classroom experiments. By doing a
questionnaire and a quiz after each experiment, the authors examined whether students had
learnt the topic of the experiment.
1. Correlations were observed not between students’ performance in the experiment and their
marks in the quiz but between students’ involvement in the experiment and their performances in
the experiment, which finding implies not a few students concentrated their efforts on making
profits as individual traders while getting little idea about how market functions as a whole.
2. Nevertheless students’ answers also suggest some of them have acquired some idea about
institutional set-up of market, which is not explained explicitly in standard introductory
microeconomics textbooks.
Key words
economics education experimental economics assessment of educational effects
classroom experiments market experiments jumping out of the system
JEL Classifications
A22 (Economics Education and Teaching of Economics, Undergraduate)
C90 (Design of Experiments, General)
C91 (Laboratory, Group Behaviour)