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Diseconomies of Scale Activities
25th September 2012
I always imagined that if an Economics Teacher ever had the equivalent of a go-to flat-headed screwdriver in their teaching toolkit, it is the activity they use to illustrate the concept of diseconomies of scale. It is a theory that will probably be taught early on during the course and has the tendency to cause a look of confusion - 'Hold on, yesterday you said that big is good! We've just got used to the idea of falling average costs.'Inventive teachers are always looking for ways to prove the proverbial 'too many cooks....' idea. Here are a couple of lesson starter resources that you might like to use to illustrate your point.
The first activity (see 'sugar' powerpoint below), is an activity asking teams to draw a simple illustration on one piece of A4 paper. The students start to get in each others way as they attempt to draw a picture of Sir Alan Sugar.
The second activity is a play on the Chinese Whispers concept called 'Dog and Bone'. Students are invited in turn to come to the front of a class and memorise an image and then re-draw that image. However, they are memorising the previous student's image each time and the quality diminishes as the each picture is drawn illustrating how management orders can be misinterpreted along the chain of command.
Instructions included in both documents.