Sim City would not be a good option -- choosing "no zoning" leads to no
city. Building no government fire halls leads to no private fire
prevention services. Same for police. Same for recreation
(stadiums). Same for transportation (airports, ports, roads, rail). Same
for power. Everything has to be done by the public sector and supported
by taxes. This game would be quite bad for testing interesting policy
options.
On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Chris Rasch wrote:
> Does anyone know if anyone has held an "economist Olympics?" via one of these
> games (e.g. Sim City)? It seems like it might be a fun tool for evaluating
> policy proposals. For example, suppose two economists disagreed about the
> effects of a given policy proposal. To resolve the issue, they have their
> students play a series of simulations (Ultima, Sim City), some of which
> implement the proposal in the meta rules of the game, some of which do not. To
> give it some teeth (a la Robin Hanson's idea futures proposal), prior to the
> games, each economist must bet on their predicted outcome.
>
>
> Can such games model reality well enough to give interesting results?
> Would economists agree on the meta-rules enough to agree to participate?
>
>
