4 ms·
Our class played a crude kind of game like this for a marketing class once. You had to choose how much to spend each quarter. After one quarter I observed no de
by oneoff786 4y ago
Our class played a crude kind of game like this for a marketing class once. You had to choose how much to spend each quarter. After one quarter I observed no declining marginal impact of hiring sales people, and a tiny, tiny boost in price from improving the product.
The next quarter my team released the shittiest product we could for the lowest price and spent 30x as much on salespeople as the next highest team.
We won by two orders of magnitude in terms of total net income. The next quarter, everyone tried to do the same thing to an even crazier extent, but there was a predetermined market size which we had already hit in Q2. So we scaled down drastically and everyone else ended up deep in the red paying spending X00 dollars in marketing to get a X0 gross margin on each customer.
In Q4 we were the only team that had enough money to field pretty much any salesmen so we did even better than Q2.
Greatly amusing.
- aconst 4y agoI played a similar game in class, in our case we put a lot on both R&D and marketing, selling expensive high quality and well marketed products. We "won" the game but our teacher was not happy about the outcome and thought he would have to make some changes to the simulation. Mind you, it was only one or two years before seeing everyone buying Apple laptops :D
- oneoff786 4y agoLol It was probably the same game. You’re saying the product was laptops right?
- ghaff 4y agoPlayed one of those in school (MarkStrat or something like that). The TA was unhappy because we were doing very well based in no small part on a large sales force. But we elected to do a fast follower strategy on a new product--but no one else really had the money to do upfront R&D so we were sort of "expected" to take the hit to make the simulation proceed as planned.
- stevesimmons 4y agoProbably Markstrat (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markstrat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markstrat). My 1999 MBA class played it. I had no idea it was so widespread, since the author was one of the professors at my business school. From the Wikipedia article, it was originally developed in 1974-77. Which makes it nearly 50 years old.
- somethoughts 4y agoI'd be interested if anyone was aware of an open source equivalent to Markstrat. I also played it in college, and eventually want to play against my kids when they reach high school.
- sogen 4y agoThe Beer Game Discussed two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302898