Public Goods & Free Riding: The Las Acacias Court
Run the council of a 38-household block deciding how to fund six community projects.
About this simulation
Eighty households share a falling-apart neighbourhood park in Verdura, Costaria. Across six rounds learners experience the free-rider problem live, then test three institutional fixes — coordination, club good, and mandatory tax — before applying the public-goods framework to street lighting, defence, climate, lighthouses, education, healthcare and more. The case for taxation is discovered, not asserted.
Who it is for
An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.
How a session runs
- The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
- Participants play 6 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
- The simulation can be run in English, Español.
- The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.