May 28, 2013, by Maggie

The Business and Management Games Room at Mayfest 2013

 

 

Colleagues from across the Business School supported the Business and Management Games Room at Mayfest this year.  The concept of the room was to use simple games to demonstrate aspects of banking, finance, marketing, management and ethics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Bank of Richard visitors were encouraged to invest their piece of (chocolate) gold in a range of businesses, all promising a variety of returns on the roll of a dice.  Would they chose the  high risks and high returns of space tourism, a familiar brand, take the sustainable route and invest in renewable energy, or go for a responsible business that is investing in their local community?

 

 

The logo game demonstrated just how much visitors of all ages knew about logos and brands.  They went on to practice their own marketing skills by using the cool wall to try to predict each others preferences for cars, fast food, soft drinks and supermarkets.

 

 

Families demonstrated their verbal communication skills discovering the challenge of building duplicate lego models using verbal descriptions only.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Others shared their problems with Paul Kirkham of the Institute of Enterprise and Innovation, and worked through the creative problem solving process to find innovative solutions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doctoral students learned about the approach that the ICCSR takes to teaching business ethics and tested their own ethical perceptions with a game of Scruples.

 

 

 

 

Daniel and Wendy demonstrated the Tragedy of the Commons, a key concept in sustainable development, by fishing for paperclips. 

 

 

 

Rodion invited visitors to the room guess the number of sweets in the jar an experiment designed to demonstrate how markets work, by testing how many participants were able to beat the market with a guess that was closer to the true value than the market value, and how many would have been better off accepting the market value.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the results of the experiment:

The market average guess was 175 sweets in Jar A and 241 sweets in Jar B (average of 91 individual guesses).The actual number of sweets in Jar A was 228. Only about one in three (35 %) participants manage to beat the market by coming up with guesses that are more accurate than the average market opinion. About two-thirds (65 %) of market participants would improve their forecasts by taking the average market opinion as their guess (see Figure A).

 

 

Figure A: Histogram of individual guesses, Jar A. The red vertical line marks the actual number of sweets in the Jar, 228.

 

 

 

 

The actual number of sweets in Jar B was 266. Only about one in eight (13 %) participants manage to beat the market by coming up with guesses that are more accurate than the average market opinion. Most (87 %) market participants would improve their forecasts by taking the average market opinion as their guess (see Figure B).

 

 

Figure B: Histogram of individual guesses, Jar B. The red vertical line marks the actual number of sweets in the Jar, 266.

 

 

 

 

It was also observed that there appeared to be a close link between the qualities of individual guesses: those people who were relatively close to guessing the true number of sweets in Jar A tend to produce more accurate guesses for Jar B (see Figure C).

 

Figure C: There appear to be a close link between the qualities of individual guesses: those people who are relatively closer to guessing the true number of sweets in Jar A tend to produce more accurate guesses for Jar B. This relationship is statistically significant.

 

 

 

 

Thank you to all the colleagues and doctoral researchers who supported the room this year and those who took time to visit.  Thank you also to the Rachel, Emily, Emily, Lucy and the Cantrell, Butterick and Scandrett-Smith families for allowing us to use their photographs in this blog.

by Maggie Royston and Dr Rodion Skovoroda.

Further information about Mayfest 2013 and more photographs from the day are available here: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mayfest/index.aspx

 UPDATE: The winner of all the sweets in Jar B with the best guess of 270 is Cherisse

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn