A few extension activities for Oligopoly

First up is this article comparing Oligopoly and Duolopoly, which I have used previously for Oxbridge prep. It's from the Metal Project and compares competitiveness in English vs Scottish football. It's reasonably challenging, but bright non-mathsy students can skip section 3 and still get a good grasp of the issues.

I'm currently working on an activity on the Economics of Crime which I'll link here once complete, but crime is the obvious place to go with cartels and oligopoly. Narconomics is a great read. More enrichment than extension, but this podcast about cartels in the narcotics industry is often popular.

Other options for enrichment include this article about AI cartels: what does artificial intelligence mean for competition policy?  or this one on how OPEC may soon lose its sway over global oil prices. In terms of podcasts there is this one about ice cream or about this one about postal services. Students might also enjoy this video about price fixing in the bread industry or this one about what happens when one EV firm lowers it's prices

For some exploration on Game Theory, there is a concise chapter in Ed Conway's '50 Economics Ideas you really need to know' (not to be confused with '50 Economics Classics' below) which is super accessible. For a deeper dive, this intro lecture from Yale should be follow-able for most A-Level students. It's part of an open course, so summary notes and further videos can be found here. I love '50 Economics Classics' by Tom Butler Bowden for introducing students to the Economic canon with its summaries on seminal works. In this case, there is a chapter on Thomas Shilling's 'Micromotives and Macrobehavior' which covers some social applications of game theory.

For those interested in the mathematical element of game theory, the old MEI course has a great mathematical comprehension paper on The Prisoner's Dilemma. The maths required is all covered in A-Level, although you might need to ask your maths department if they have covered the necessary topics yet. The article itself is an interesting read on its own, but there is also a fab set of questions (skip to page 6). You can find the answers here.

For the real maths fans, send them on a rabbit hole of topology with the link between the Nash Equilibrium and Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem.