Game—A Carbon Emissions Game

Abstract

Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit Abstract. This paper describes a carbon trading game to be played in a classroom setting. The game is modeled on real-world electric power markets with a carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions cap, often referred to as a "cap-and-trade" system. Players assume the roles of competing utilities, each with a fossil fuel plant and a renewable energy plant. Any electricity generated by fossil fuel requires offsetting carbon credits, which are available via auction. Depending on the auction price, it can be cheaper or more expensive to generate electricity with fossil fuel versus renewables. The goals of the game are: for students to become acquainted with cap-and-trade markets; to understand how regulatory policy applied to a market can induce environmental benefits; to discover how to mathematically derive strategies; to get a taste of basic game theory, auctions, and the newsvendor problem; and to meet these objectives in a fun setting. While fairly straightforward and simplified to provide symmetry among student competitors, the game can lead to surprisingly interesting results. This paper describes the game and how to facilitate it, presents strategies, analyzes games that were played, introduces novel quantitative measures to evaluate the quality of game play, and offers a number of suggestions for extending the game.

Game—The Beer Transportation Game: How to Decarbonize Logistics by Moving Freight to Sustainable Transport Modes

“…As documented in Heineke and Meile (1995), it has helped students to understand the dynamics of supply chains and especially the "bullwhip" effect. Over the years, many other games, such as the dual sourcing game (Allon and Van Mieghem 2010b), the energy supply game (Belien et al 2013), and the carbon trading game (Frommer and Robert 2017), among others, have successfully simplified sophisticated OM problems into interesting cases and exercises. They allow students to focus on the managerial insights without being confused by the complicated mathematical models.…”

Game—Rolling the Dice on Global Supply Chain Sustainability: A Total Cost of Ownership Simulation

“…Investigation into classroom exercises focusing on supply chain sustainability and TCO found similar scarcity. On the sustainability side, classroom exercises often have a modeling focus (Godfrey and Manikas 2012, Beliën et al 2013, Frommer and Day 2017, while there are even fewer TCO classroom exercises available. Although the concept of TCO is well developed and widely used in business (Ellram and Siferd 1993), especially in some industries where the initial outlay of a product or service is low compared with maintenance and other costs occurring during the lifetime of the system, TCO teaching literature is not so prevalent.…”

A Learning Curve‐Based Assembly Game

“…Hill and Baker () use a physical product design simulation to reinforce operations concepts in product design. Frommer and Day () use a game to help students develop familiarity with emissions markets and cap and trade programs. Fish () uses a string‐based game to teach statistical process control.…”