Market Design: Cannabis in Germany

These teaching packs are designed for 30-minute (online or offline) sessions that can be included within any lecture or tutorial class. They are designed to be suitable for university students, but could easily be adapted for higher or lower levels. Every month, we will publish at least one exercise that you can use to engage your students with current events. The main aims of these exercises are to give students practice in relating economic ideas to the real world and their own lived experiences.

Newspaper articles or videos are used as the entry point to an economic topic, which is then expanded upon by the instructor before the students are broken into small groups to engage in an activity. This will help students to develop the skills required to work as economists in the real world, and all the materials you need are provided for you. These teaching packs are published as creative commons (CC BY) and can be freely used and adopted.

Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapely won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on market design back in 2012, but it is a field that is still underrepresented in economics education. All markets have rules, and how these rules are set influence how the market functions.

This teaching pack takes cannabis in Germany as an example of a market that does not yet have a full set of rules. We do not cover arguments for or against the legalisation of cannabis, instead we accept that the German government has chosen to do this, and focus on the question of how to design the market.