Z:gnu-www-ja-frank--c59e68-The first introductory microec/en

The first introductory microeconomics instructor (instructor A) whose students we surveyed is a mainstream economist with research interests in industrial organization and game theory. In class lectures, this instructor placed heavy emphasis on the prisoner's dilemma and related illustrations of how survival imperatives often militate against cooperation. The second microeconomics instructor (instructor B) is a specialist in economic development in Maoist China who did not emphasize such material to the same degree, but did assign a mainstream introductory text. On the basis of these differences, our expectation was that any observed effects of economics training should be stronger in instructor A's class than in instructor B's. The results for the three classes are summarized in Figures 10-12.