Plotting the supply and demand curves in class using live data collected from students ;Part II

Well, I have some very good news and not so good news from the sessions on pricing.

On the plus side, the live demonstration went well. The students had interesting conversations and created their own supply and demand curves. I even managed to catch the suppliers just when they were beginning to collude to fix the prices in the market. The consumers too were quite vocal about the issues they faced. Constraints on the total amount of money they had came up, and that led us to some beautiful conversations. Some students reported to me today that they did discuss with their friends from the other side after class. Since there was some peer learning after class hours (something that does not usually happen in online classes), I am going to call that a win.

On the flip side, there were some issues that I faced, and I think I should improve on them the next time I try this exercise.

• I should have made this a two-stage game. One with some form of budget constraint, and another without. This would have helped me illustrate some ideas better. I may run the experiment twice from next year on.
• It may have been a good idea to keep the values they could enter open ended. Many students did ask me why they could not have lower (or higher) quantity demanded at specific prices. There were no reasons why those limits should have existed. I could have just asked them to enter a numerical value instead.
• I should report that some students had a positive slope for their demand curve. I was not sure what they were thinking, and since I did not record their names when entering, I could not really ask them what went on in their minds. It may have been an interesting discussion.
• I did not specify the line thickness in the original code, nor did I experiment with colours. I have added some modifications after class to make the charts look nicer now.

Here are the plots that we generated in class:

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who gave me wonderful suggestions o better the in class delivery and the code. Some of my friends recommended that I use github to post the code to provide easy updates and track usage. I am planning to implement this in the days to come. When I do, I shall post the code that I used on Tuesday’s class as well.

As always, happy teaching (and learning) !