Methodology to Select the Best Business Game in Higher Education
590
tain and competitive env ironment [2,6].
In order to learn to be effective, it is essential that the
student involves creatively and perseveres in the game,
and the professor is constant in advice and in control of
the students, pr oviding continuous fee dback [7].
The unlimited grade of realism of this simulation con-
tributes to making evident that the ethical solution of
business problems of international nature requires diag-
nostic capacity and conceptual reasoning superior to
what management usually calls for in most cases; quail-
ties that for another side certainly are developed by
business games independently of their other possible me-
rits.
Through the bibliographical revision made, this re-
search expects to determine the business game with most
pedagogical effectiveness, from a teaching approach,
through the use of multi-criteria methodology “Measur-
ing Attractiveness by a Category Based Evaluation Tech-
nique” (MACBETH). For this, we have considered the
features that better describe a business simulator from a
pedagogical approach: clarity in its instructions, creativ-
ity developed in students, grade of complexity, repre-
sented reality, fulfillment of the faculty educational ob-
jectives and the students expectations, and the grade
shown in the interrelation between several business ar-
eas.
The rest of the features have been avoided for being
considered hard to measure by a professor in an objective
way, being more feasible to value by the student. This
will open as a future line of research, similar studies from
a student approach.
2. Field Work
Field work has taken place during the months of Febru-
ary, March and April of 2013. The information is gath-
ered through a survey sent by e-mail to 300 college pro-
fessors of several Spanish universities that implement
business simulation games, using as support a question-
naire composed of 10 questions (See Annex 1). There
were 130 surveys received, from which 17 were dis-
carded for not completing the required fields correctly,
leaving the sample object of study constituted by 113
professors, from the following universities: Deusto,
Pompeu Fabra, Rey Juan Carlos, ICADE, Universidad de
Valladolid, UNED, CEU San Pablo, ESIC, Universidad
de Extremadura, Universidad de Jaen, Universidad de la
Laguna and the Universidad Pública de Navarra.
The games used by the faculty of these universities are
the following nine: International Operation Simulation
(INTOP), Venture Game, Business Strategy Game 8.0,
Directivo Game (Manager Game), Juego del Ejecutivo
(Game of the Executive), Estratega Game (Strategist
Game), International Operations Simulation Mark 2000
(INTOPIA), Global Marketing Competition, and Labo-
ratorio de Gestion (Management Laboratory).
The purpose of this survey is to know the opinion of
the faculty staff regarding certain aspects of the game
that they use in their teaching. Considering the mean of
the received responses for each game, and using the
MACBETH approach, it will be possible to establish a
hierarchical order that will allow determining the opti-
mum simulator, between the ones consid ered, valuing its
pedagogical efficiency.
3. Analytical Procedure
The methodology used in this research is supported in the
multi-criteria analysis to obtain a classification of the
simulation games mentioned previously (which act as
classified alternatives), in role of its educational features
(which act as criteria or variables to consider).
The selection made of a multi-criteria methodology is
based in the existence o f multiple criteria (features in this
case), that have to be evaluated and classified from a
uniform perspective. This way, the objective of the de-
cider or evaluator (decision maker) will be to identify an
alternative, in this case a simulation game that satisfies,
in every way possible, all the selected criteria. Despite
the previous, it should be emphasize that an ab solute and
valid “better solution” will not exist for all the decision-
makers, because the results of the multi-criteria problem
will depend of the personal preferences of each one of
the professors. Such preferences can be expressed in a
quantitative or qualitative way, for the several existing
methodologies for the processing of information.
The object of study provides quantitative information
(expressed through rating scales) about the opinion of a
group of Spanish university professors regarding the
educational features of a set of business games. This in-
formation was gathered through a survey made, which
was previ ously explain e d.
The MACBETH methodology was used for the han-
dling of data introduced by Bana e Costa and Vansnick
in 1994 and developed in the fall of 2002 trough M-
MACBETH software by the same authors with De Corte1
Such election responds to the fact that the previous tech-
nique requires exclusively qualitative judgment over the
attractive differences within elements, to generate scores
for the options of each criterion and to rank those criteria
[8,9].
The MACBETH method is based in the theory of the
multi-attribute utility, developed by Keeney and Raiffa in
1976, in which each criterion indicated a partial descrip-
tion of the utility of the choices under a certain perspec-
tive. Such partial utilit ies, aggregated by a value fun ction,
will serve as reference to calculate the total utility, which
will be taken as base to solve the problem.
1An introduction and demonstration of such software can be found at
the web site: http://www.m-macbeth.com
Open Access AJIBM
