Survival - Lecture notes 1-10 PDF

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How to play economics...

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AN IDEA-BASED SURVIVAL KIT - Follow  the instructions in the “Guide to the Game” on your Playconomics course website to learn how to play the game and create / save idea nodes. In this kit we assume that you know how the basic game works. BEFORE WE START! - You don’t need to use ideas / automation to get the course marks you need for this course. You can easily get up to 100 Happiness in only 30 minutes of manual gameplay, if you think like an economist: 1) If you are the only student in your region, take advantage of your market power! Start many firms using BOTs, and make sure you set up your supply chain to produce complex goods, such as spaghetti for instance (they give a big utility boost). You can manually collect goods from your own inventory tables (by clicking on the good placed on the table), and eat that combination of goods that maximise your happiness (tip: check the marginal utility for each good by hovering over them in your inventory)

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2) If there are many students in your region, take advantage of the competition! Students around you are probably also starting firms. This will put upward pressure on wages for BOTs, which will increase the price of the final goods. Calculate your comparative advantage based on your agents’ skills (see “Guide to the Game” on your Playconomics course website for how you do this) and market prices

- Then start manually producing the goods for which you have a comparative advantage

- Next, sell your products on the market by placing them on your inventory table (click the item in your inventory and then click on the table)

- Finally, use the money you made to manually purchase goods from other students’ inventory-tables, and eat the combination of goods that maximises your happiness

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ADVANCED TIPS - Your agent will eventually pass away because of old age, so the objective of the game is not necessarily to keep your character alive forever. On the contrary, the objective is to make the most of the lifetimes of your agents in a long chain of ancestry. Passing away does not make you lose marks --- so there is no direct penalty for losing an agent. Let’s see how you would do that - To begin with, create a bed

- Then, create a new idea by first clicking the “cog” icon, and then the “add new idea” icon

- Now you are ready to create your first node by clicking the “context” menu and then the “Night” node. The node (12:00am) will appear in the world

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- Drag the arrow with your mouse and release your mouse button, the “context” menu will automatically appear. Select the Interact node

- These nodes are now linked. When midnight comes, the red node will be triggered. The connecting line indicates that the Interact node will be triggered right after

- Drag out the white circle (“Interact Item”) and move your pointer over the bed. Release your mouse to open the context menu and select the first entry (“Patchy Bed”)

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- Make sure your idea is saved by clicking the save button. The cog above your agent should be moving slowly --- the idea is in idle mode, not currently active, but waiting for a trigger event to get into motion. At midnight, the cog will start spinning faster and your agent will automatically go to bed, even when you are not actively playing the game or you are offline altogether. Your agent will never suffer from lack of sleep!

- Using the same approach, connect the “Interact” node to a “Get Average Resource Price”. Right after sleeping, your character will figure out the Average Price at which Coconuts are currently sold in the market. Connect “Get Trade Resource Price” to a “Create Food Contract” to order 1 Coconut, at reservation price equal to the Average Price at which Coconuts are currently sold in the market (this is achieved by connecting the two circles in the picture). When your agent receives the Coconut from the market, they will eat it right away!

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- Overall, this simple survival strategy does the following: it sends your agent to sleep every night at midnight. After waking up, your agent will figure out the average price of a coconut and make a demand order for 1 coconut (at the average price of a coconut in the market). You can expand and customize your idea as you see fit. Eating only 1 coconut per day might not be enough, and eating a variety of goods helps because of decreasing marginal utility - To make sure there is enough supply of coconuts in the market, you can become a producer yourself! Follow the instructions in the “Guide to the Game” on your Playconomics course website to learn how to start multiple companies producing coconuts

Now you’re ready to become the economic mastermind of your agent! Hope you enjoy, The Playconomics team

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