MONABUS - A Business Simulation Exercise

Original by Walter Lewis Brown Jr. in 1966.
Ported to JavaScript by Norbert Kehrer in 2020.

Game

Industry 1Firm 1:Firm 2:Firm 3:
Period 0ActualsDecisionActualsDecisionActualsDecision
Price 6.25 6.25 6.25
Quality 3.00 3.00 3.00
Marketing 230,000 230,000 230,000
Styling and Design 165,000 165,000 165,000
Production Volume 430,000 430,000 430,000
Investment in Plant 225,000 225,000 225,000
Debt Payment 0 0 0
Industry Sales 1,371,729 1,371,729 1,371,729
Potential Firm Sales 457,243 457,243 457,243
Actual Firm Sales 457,243 457,243 457,243
Ending Inventory 122,757 122,757 122,757
Inventory Unit Value 2.88 2.88 2.88
Capacity Next Quarter 450,000 450,000 450,000
 
 
Profit and Loss
 
Sales 2,857,770 2,857,770 2,857,770
Expenses
- Manufacturing Costs 1,182,662 1,182,662 1,182,662
- Adm. and Selling 604,311 604,311 604,311
- Marketing 230,000 230,000 230,000
- Styling and Design 165,000 165,000 165,000
- Depreciation 225,000 225,000 225,000
- Reduction in Inv. Value 78,329 78,329 78,329
- Inv. Carrying Charge 21,177 21,177 21,177
- Interest on Debt 0 0 0
Total 2,506,479 2,506,479 2,506,479
 
Profit before Taxes 351,291 351,291 351,291
Net Profit 175,646 175,646 175,646
 
 
Balance Sheet
 
Cash 2,753,975 2,753,975 2,753,975
Inventory 352,949 352,949 352,949
Net Plant 9,000,000 9,000,000 9,000,000
 
Debt 0 0 0
Owner's Equity 12,106,924 12,106,924 12,106,924

Background

In 1966, Walter Lewis Brown wrote his master's thesis at the University of Montana, in which he describes his management game MONABUS. The exact citation is:

Brown, Walter L., MONABUS - A Business Simulation Exercise, Master's thesis, University of Montana, USA, 1966.

The thesis describes a very nice and simple round-based management game, where three teams of students can make key decisions, like production volume, selling price etc., for the next time period for their respective firms. The game administrator then feeds punch cards with these decision parameters into the computer (an IBM 1620 back in 1966), which then simulates their consequences on the market and for the three companies. The outcome is a printout with financial statements and market data for the firms. The paper is handed over to the student teams as the basis to prepare their decisions for the next period.

The thesis is nicely built-up. It contains an introduction, a manual for the participants, a manual for the game administrator, decision forms, and instructions for the operating staff of the computer center. Of course, the students were usually not allowed to directly operate the computer by themselves back then :-/

I can tell you, that it is quite fun to play these kind of games. I had the pleasure to participate in such a game at my university back in the 1980s. It was called MARKSTRAT (which still exists today), also ran on an IBM machine (a 4331 mainframe), and, even if it was twenty years later, we as students still had no access to the machine itself, but just received paper printouts. I bet, the administrator even fed our decisions into the machine via punch cards (the virtual ones, though, which VM/SP, our IBM's operating system, emulated as part of its virtual machine engine).

Walter's MONABUS thesis luckily also contains the complete listing of his computer program written in the programming language FORTRAN. This is my translation of the original program to JavaScript. I tried to keep the program semantically equal to the original code, but "modernized" it a little bit in the code, by having long variable names, and in the output for the browser. It is quite hard to beat the standard parameter setup, actually.

The source code of my JavaScript program is available on GitHub.

Read more about this and my other projects on my website https://norbertkehrer.github.io.

Have fun.

Norbert