The Beer Game

A quick note to mention the beer game played at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, described in the MIT Technology Review.

The game is a simple but ingenious method of modeling how actors’ decision making is constrained by the system in which the actors operate. Decisions made at one level in the absence of critical information ripple through the system, producing wild fluctuations in the way the system behaves. The game could probably be easily adapted to type of decision making just by relabeling the costs, benefits, and players’ roles.