Extreme Pricing Goes Viral: Lessons for Teaching Price Controls

Price controls are a popular topic among students. However, the effects of implementing price controls are not as straightforward as students typically expect, especially the unintended consequences that students tend to overlook. This paper provides three teaching guides designed to teach price controls which can be easily implemented in an introductory-level economics course. We build on the work of Geerling et al. (2023c) by using short-form viral videos from popular platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, which match the streaming and content medium of choice for Gen Z. The use of celebrities and social media influencers make abstract teaching moments more relatable to students. As such, this paper offers a unique opportunity for creatively teaching economics to a new generation of students.