To Present or Not: Are Students Rational?
Two students requested their oral presentations in an Economics class be rescheduled for another day. Their professor could allow no more than one rescheduled presentation but responding to the request of one of the students while not doing it for the other would be unfair. She wondered what she could do to accommodate both students. Her decision was to propose a solution which created a dynamic game of complete information, learned in undergraduate courses in Game Theory and Intermediate Microeconomics.
After completing this case, students should be able to:
1. Identify the players in a game, as well as their strategies and payoffs.
2. Recognize a dynamic game of complete information and explain why a given situation belongs to these types of games.
3. Interpret the information a decision tree conveys.
4. Analyze a dynamic game of complete information using the backward induction method and find the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) of these types of games.
5. Evaluate the validity of assumptions and defend that an outcome violates given assumptions