Salt Seller: Realization of a business game

This paper describes the realization and implementation of a business game named Salt Seller. Salt Seller was first described by John Sterman in 2014 and implemented for the MIT Sloan School of Management. However, Sterman only provided a high-level description of Salt Seller and no low-level details about the realization or the market model were revealed. Our first aim is to fill this gap. As our second contribution introduces a generalized n-person framework for round-based games which serves as an abstract game architecture and encapsulates the round synchronization mechanisms. Utilizing this framework we provide a detailed view on a possible model of the market mechanisms for Salt Seller. We describe all the market functions which are needed to calculate the game outputs in each period. Our work aims to improve decision making in management and to support teaching. To support this third goal we implemented the game using modern web technologies allowing us to use the game in students´ lessons at the KIT. All input and output parameters of every round are stored in a database for later analysis of the players´ behaviour. Generally, our implementation demonstrates how general round-based multi-player games can be realized in a browser, our architecture supports various other 2-player round-based games.