Economics Contest 5: Ice Cream Game – 30 Hive Power to be won

over 1 year ago

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the fifth Economics Contest for 2023. This month is the Ice Cream Game Contest. This is a brand new contest for 2023. There are no additional references I can provide for this contest. Therefore, you will need to rely purely on the information given in this post. If anything is unclear, you can seek clarification in the comments section.

Welcome to the Ice Cream Game

How to play?

The ‘Ice Cream’ Game requires participants to select a beach and then a location on that beach to set-up an ice cream stand. The stand attracts customers based on its proximity to customers. The stand can only attract customers that do not need to pass another ice cream stand (competitor) to reach it. We could argue that the ice creams sold by each stand are identical.

All the information you need to know to play the game is provided in the question; i.e. no external research is required as all prices are hypothetical and locations are fictitious.

All entries must be made in the comments section of this post.

Each account is only permitted one entry.

Participants are not permitted to edit their entry after stating the location for their stand in the comments section.

Only one participant can select a particular location. For example, if someone has already selected location SZ, nobody else can select it. For this contest, there only 33 locations. Therefore, only a maximum of 33 participants can enter; more details given later in the post.

Objectives of the game

The objective of the game is to obtain the highest number of customers from the sale of ice cream. If two participants attract the exact number of customers, the participant who entered first wins.

Game assumptions

Prices and costs are not relevant to this contest.
Potential customers are evenly distributed across the lengths of the beaches.
Each beach has a predetermined number of locations for setting up stands. For example, a beach that is 2000 metres long might have 21 possible locations for stands. These possible locations are located 100 metres apart. A participant could place their stand at the 0 metre mark, 100 metre mark, 200 metre mark, … , 2000 metre mark.
Customers are divided equally between the closest stands. For example, if there are 100 customers between two stands, 50 would go to each stand.
Players are assigned a number based on order of entry. This is important as there is a high chance of a tie.

What information is provided?

The lengths of the beaches.
The number of beaches.
The number of locations to place stands on each beach.
Relationship between number of customers and number of stands
The exact number of customers on each beach is not provided. Instead, a range is provided. This range follows a uniform distribution. The range is used to determine an initial number of customers; this number is then adjusted by a factor relating to the number of stands. For example, the number of customers could be 400 if the beach was served by just one ice cream stand. For every ice cream stand added, the number of customers increases by 10% (linear). Therefore, if the beach was served by 8 ice cream stands, the number of customers would be 680 (400 + (40 × 7)).

The gif below contains an example of how the game is played. It displays the number of customers each ice cream stand attracts once new participants enter. The last image displays the winner.

Note: There are 480 potential customers. For this example, for simplicity, assume additional stands do not attract more potential customers,

How are the results of the game determined?

A Microsoft Excel Model is used to determine the number of customers for each beach. The customers will be divided up amongst the ice cream stands based on where they are located on the beach. In the results post, the calculation of results will be presented in a video.

Contest Prizes

The account with the winning entry will receive 30 Hive Power and the first 12 entries will be given upvotes.

Let the contest begin

For this contest, participants have a choice of 3 beaches. These beaches are as follows:

East Beach
West Beach
South Beach

East Beach is 1,200m long. It has 13 possible locations for ice cream stands. West Beach is 800m long. It has 9 possible locations for ice cream stands. South Beach is 1,000m long. It has 11 possible locations for ice cream stands. Below is a map of the 3 beaches.

Map of Island with Beaches

Table 1 contains the possible locations for ice cream stands. Refer to map for the placement of these locations.

Possible locations for Ice Cream Stands

There is no certainty regarding the number of potential customers for ice cream on any given day. Instead, we have a range for the possible number of potential customers each beach could receive. In addition to this estimate, each ice cream stand will attract more customers to the beaches. See the range of customers and the percentage increase in the number of customers caused by increasing the number of ice cream stands in the table below.

Range of possible number of customers on each beach

Entry format

For this contest, I expect to see entries made in the following format:

Location:

Example of entry

Location: EI

The closing date and time for this contest is 6PM coordinated universal time (UTC) 29/05/2023. Responses after this time will not be accepted. The answers will be provided in the results post along with the video containing the generation of the total number of customers for each beach as well as the number of customers for each stand.

I hope everyone has fun and enjoys this month’s contest.

If you want to read any of my other posts, you can click on the links below. These links will lead you to posts containing my collection of works. These 'Collection of Works' posts have been updated to contain links to the Hive versions of my posts.