Policy making is never easy, and when you have to decide the future of your country’s financial stability the stakes are quite high. That is exactly what Emzingo Winter 2012 fellow Svetlana Pashchenko and future Emzingo Summer 2012 fellow Ankur Dhawan learned recently.
Svetlana and Ankur participated in the first demonstration of IE Business School’s new simulation game “10 Downing Street”. This is an economic policy simulation game in which the students role-play being the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This new game is the brainchild of IE Business economics professor and regular Emzingo academic facilitator Prof. Gayle Allard.
In this new multimedia game, six teams of students engage in 80-minutes of debating policy options before voting on a course of action. In each round the option with the most support is then put into action and sets a course of reactions.
The scenario is quite familiar, the world is entangled in recession and one of the country’s largest banks is in the verge of collapse due to liquidity problems. The students, that are encouraged to collaborate rather than compete, have three options in a series of rounds. They can publicly bail out the bank, risking general panic in the financial sector; they can secretly move to shore it up; or they can leave the bank’s fate to the market.
What would you do?
Read a recently published NY Times article about “10 Downing Street”