MAGES MAnagement GamE Simulator

Objectives:

The Business Faculty at Universidad de los Andes offers a course where students simulate a real business environment in which corporations compete in the same industry to increase market shares and shareholder equity. In this course, called Management Game, students form corporative groups and take business decisions that have an impact on their financial and/or operative state. The main goal of those decisions is to increase their market shares.

As shown in figure 1, the stakeholders of the management game are: (1) the professor and (2) the student. The professor configures a business environment whereas the student takes the decisions that he/she considers appropriate for increasing the market shares of his/her company. The main goal of this project is to provide a tool that enables to simulate the decisions taken by the student in the business environment configured by the professor.

Figure 1. MAGES Overview

Main results

The main result we achieved in this project corresponds to a core a simulation engine that can interpret the definition of decisions to execute the instances of decisions that each corporative group makes by (1) receiving as input some basic decision parameters, (2) recollecting data from the business environment, (3) processing formulas with the parameters and the data recollected, and finally (4) generating the effects on financial states (modify the amount of money in an account) and on operative states (create, modify or delete the “ownership” of an item).

The MAGES System also offers a web based interface for the professor to define the business environment parameters, advance the periods in the game, execute  the simulation  (and roll it back several times in case he is not satisfied with the results) and view reports on the state of the corporative groups. It also has a web based interface for the students to manage their corporative groups, take decisions and view reports of the state of their groups.