Getting Your Students to be Dynamic: Lesson and Web App about Market Dynamics in the Long-Run

Teaching †University of Nebraska at OmahaEconomics instruction is moving away from lecture and "talking at students" toward engaging student activities in which students discover economic concepts through interactive demonstrations.This paper provides a simple, effective demonstration of how profit motivates exit and entry in a perfectly competitive market.The lesson shows how market dynamics work and why in the long-run there is zero (or near zero) economic profit.The paper also shows instructors how to use a web app designed to simplify this lesson in their own class, making the game less about calculating profit and more about understanding the important economic concepts of entry and exit and long-run market dynamics.Acknowledgements: Thank you to Price V. Fishback for the initial idea.It was demonstrated to Jamie Wagner at an FTE Economics for Leaders camp by Tom Lampe