Economics - Feedback and local tweaks from UCB run-of-show incoperated

[nuke-web3]

<WIP issue, editing this comment as more things are discovered / tweaked>

Based on this wave, here are some TODOs we will want to update in closing this issue too:

• [ ] update the mod README with the schedule that actually happened for reference.
• [ ] all charts/plots should have legible axis some where tiny and/or missing.
• [ ] include https://polkadot.network/blog/making-history-an-overview-of-the-first-five-parachain-slot-auctions-on-kusama in the slides where it was mentioned, something close to https://do-not-share-pba-internal.on.fleek.co/syllabus/2-Economics/2.3-Price_Finding_Mechanisms/2.3-Price_Finding_Mechanisms_slides.html#/48 I believe.
• [ ] ... more?

[Overkillus]

I mostly don't see the benefit of using the whiteboard. All the charts/ graphs done on the whiteboard could have been individual slides.

The only exception was asking students about the payoff from the chicken game which was actually a good use case for it as we cannot predict what will they say.

Also I'd embed the nash eq. calcs in the slides instead of waving your hands around the payoff table. Just the way I did in https://github.com/Polkadot-Blockchain-Academy/pba-content/pull/698 . Essentially highlight the fixed action from one player, select one option, then highlight another etc. I feel like many students were pretty lost in the process of calculating it.

Also the chicken game needs more clarifications around the goal of the game. We want the students to come up with the payoff matrices but many had so vastly different interpretations of the game it undermined further discussions about the actual chicken game. Highlight that this is a bravery test so the person surviving the challenge without chickening out is the hero. This will at least point them in the right direction.

Also this is my opinion and I had the same feeling in PBA2. Some students still have a relatively lackluster understanding of rationality/nash eq. so naturally they come up with a bunch of incorrect hypothesis. When that happens the lecturers need to clearly stand their ground and call it out. If students are incorrect directly say it's incorrect, because sometimes it became a bit too hand-wavy. Nash eq. are not a matter of opinions so they shouldn't get the wrong impressions.

[naterarmstrong]

I'm just leaving feedback here @jonasW3F because you mentioned being interested in constructive feedback.

Everything was really great, the only point is that it might be helpful for students to have a strong and slightly less strong example for Schelling points, including one that is more universally relatable. I know that I don't have a super strong intuitive understanding with the NYC meeting point one because I don't know much about new york. I'm partial to the letter order example, which is a coordination game with the prompt "Given the letters "B", "C", and "A", put them in some order. If your order is the same as the other person, you both win". From the wikipedia page, that has about 80% of people picking "ABC". A weaker Schelling point could be picking "heads" or "tails". I find these more compelling than the NYC example.

[AlfonsoCev]

A couple of comments I heard from students about 2.3:

• I presented the "theoretical" version of English auctions, where price is increasing continuously and bidders are assumed to accept it until they signal that they leave. This is different from the standard version, where price only increases when a bidder makes a new bid. I should have clarified the equivalence of these versions, so it makes sense to them when I say that in an English auction the winner doesn't really decide how much they pay, because they pay (close to) the second highest bid.

• I was told there are videos of Dutch auctions for flowers that take place online, and they're super fast, just a few seconds per auction. Next time we could add a GIF of one of those auctions on a slide. We should also highlight that Dutch auctions have the advantage of being time efficient.

• From some comments during the final auction game, it looks like some people thought that bidding half your valuation is optimal. Maybe I should have clarified that this is only true when there are two bidders. (I already mentioned that this is only true for a Dutch or first-price sealed auction, and only if bidders are risk neutral, but I could highlight these conditions even more.)

[jonasW3F]

I have a few points that I want to improve towards the next PBA:

Lesson 2.1

• Polish a bit the market form chapter, remove redundancies
• Lesson takes 2h and Workshop/discussuons 1.5h, add that to the course overview.
• Academy Games:
  • Explain the games more slowly.
  • Show examples for UG + Cournot Competition (what happens if player 1 does this and player 2 this)
  • Edit screenshot of cournot that incorrectly states the game is repeated for 2 rounds (instead 10)
  • Make sure students know they have the same partner in the cournot game

Lesson 2.2

• Lesson takes 1h and Workshop/discussuons 3h, add that to the course overview.
• Explain NE better and more clearly. Use slides how to find the NE.
• First part of the lecture was a bit too many slides without a small discussion. Adding one discussion would be good.
• Academy Games
  • Add timeouts to guessing game and shorten timeout for result pages.
  • Potentially add the "Trust Game" and add some content on Trust (but this needs to be coordinated with the smart-contracts team that also have a chapter on it).

Lesson 2.3 (only from the perspective of Academy Games)

• Potentially add a graph on the development of bid sizes across time.
• Show all NFTs of the collection.

Lesson 2.4 (only from the perspective of Academy Games)

• Potentially add some voting games. This poses some challenges regarding payouts (since they use their budget in the auctions), but maybe we can find some fun games that are non-incentivized. Or we add a separate budget for them.

[Overkillus]

I also had some good feedback from a student about the Tokenomics lecture. Overall the lecture was really nice for what it tried to convey, but the concern is for the overall direction of it. Mainly shouldn't we focus more on tokenomics in general instead of Polkadot specifically? Shouldn't we aim for students/founders to be able to PLAN the tokenomics of their own systems instead of simply seeing what Polkadot does?

The student said he'd like to learn:

• When a chain or application should have a token (one token? many tokens? no tokens?)
• if I'm building a chain or application should it be inflationary? If so what % yearly and how do you select it?
• What are some methods of distributing rewards I can choose for my model? How to drive inflation?
• Burning tokens, when and why
• How to choose how many funds should secure a system in PoS (if it is even needed at all)

And a few others but overall more focus on how to design those tokenomic systems instead of simply presenting one (Polkadot).

Any thoughts on that? I honestly somewhat agree that this direction would be nice. @jonasW3F would like you to tune in.

[naterarmstrong]

One more thing:

It might be nice to incorporate this directly or indirectly into the curriculum in some way. I find it a super engaging exploration into the prisoner's dilemma with different strategies and circumstances. Covers number of rounds, fault tolerance, and a population of different strategies.