Early-Determined Business Endgame Standings

Teach and Patel reported that teams playing CAPSTONE arrived at their final financial standings early in the game. Based on this, they concluded that participants could feel the game was unfair and that further plays beyond the game’s early rounds might be counterproductive from a game-grade perspective, and even worse, from a learning perspective. Their study was repeated using 1,164 CAPSTONE firms in 194 competitions for 9,312 rounds of play. Their findings of early-determined first-place and last-place finishes were not confirmed based on either cumulative or round-by-round profits. The Teach and Patel research design was also applied to a larger scale game. The results found a company’s early results were low predictors of their final results which did not support the early-finish observation. Game users are cautioned that the educational benefits of any game depends on optimizing all aspects of the simulation’s teaching/learning environment and that competitive fluidity exists throughout a game’s duration.