Four Âé¶¹´«Ã½ uppers outmatch rivals to win Northwestern Economics Tournament.
For the third consecutive year, a team from the Âé¶¹´«Ã½ Economics Association has won the .
The four-player team — uppers Drona Gaddam, David Liu, Eli Orbach and Lake Zho — swept both the buzzer-based EconBowl and the written test Power Round to claim top honors among 21 high school teams from around the country. Founded in 2016, NET is run by undergraduates of Northwestern University with funding and logistical support from the school’s Economics Department.
EconBowl is a series of one-on-one buzzer rounds where the moderator reads a question and teams race to buzz in and answer. Among economics competitions, NET is distinctive for asking particularly challenging questions, leaning more towards technical details and models rather than introductory material and trivia. “This has historically benefited the Âé¶¹´«Ã½ team, since we have accumulated quite a store of knowledge over our years of competing,” said Orbach, the team’s captain.
The Power Round is a 90-minute group economics test, with questions typically hovering around the advanced undergraduate level. This year, the questions revolved around adaptive expectations of inflation, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, calculations with tax rates, and a small general equilibrium model in an agricultural context, according to Orbach, the team’s captain.