EPTOn November 13 2008 12:53 vAltyR wrote:
Give them a quiz:
You have 5 points. You have the option of putting any number of points into a community pool, or you may withhold them for yourself. All the points put in the community pool will be doubled and redistributed evenly amongst the class. The amount of points you end up with will be your grade on the quiz.
How many points will you donate to the community pool?
It's a perfect segue into the free rider problem. when we did this in econ, everyone in the class was like "hey, put it all in the pool, that way we all get 10 points and get an A!" sounds good, right?
Well, what if i decide to keep all my points? the five points missing from the pool won't be enough to bring down the number of points given out, so everyone else will still get 10, but i'll get 15! of course, on the flip side, if nobody puts in any points, everyone will end up with 5 points. It's a very interesting problem.
Give them a quiz:
You have 5 points. You have the option of putting any number of points into a community pool, or you may withhold them for yourself. All the points put in the community pool will be doubled and redistributed evenly amongst the class. The amount of points you end up with will be your grade on the quiz.
How many points will you donate to the community pool?
It's a perfect segue into the free rider problem. when we did this in econ, everyone in the class was like "hey, put it all in the pool, that way we all get 10 points and get an A!" sounds good, right?
Well, what if i decide to keep all my points? the five points missing from the pool won't be enough to bring down the number of points given out, so everyone else will still get 10, but i'll get 15! of course, on the flip side, if nobody puts in any points, everyone will end up with 5 points. It's a very interesting problem.
We talked about stuff like this in my Discrete Math class. Tha might be fun. You could discuss something along these lines and towards the end of class conduct the experiment or something.
