The Counterintuitive Concept of Ergodicity in the Context of a Business Simulation Game

Bika, Chrysa; Koblitz, Sarah; Faizan, Nilüfer; Heininger, Robert; Utesch, Matthias Christoph; Krcmar, Helmut

The concept of ergodicity as described in the London Mathematical Laboratory seems very counterintuitive. Something is ergodic when its time average equals to its expectation value. Transferring this sentence into a more suitable real-life situation, one can say pooling and sharing earnings will increase one’s wealth steadily over time. One may wonder why should they cooperate with each other when they all have bad exterior conditions? Will cooperation not make everything worse? We developed a Business Simulation Game, New Rising of the Ylsung concept, which tests different parameters to visualize the concept of ergodicity. We distinguished that in most of the cases it brings a greater advantage to collaborate than to work by oneself. Moreover, the simulation helps high school students to understand the research of the London Mathematical Laboratory in a playful manner. Hence, they do not have to read research papers, but simply play through our Business Simulation Game while adjusting the parameter sets and analyzing the graphs. Our main aim is to find out to what extend the application of different parameters between cooperation and non-cooperation differ from each other and how the application of those looks in real-life scenarios.