Comparative Advantage Calculator

Number of people:

Instructions Insert the number of people in your comparative advantage problem and press create table to begin inputting your data. Then press Calculate Results to get the optimal pairing of people with goods as determined by comparative advantage. Note: only integer values may be entered. If you don't have integer values, multiply the whole table by the LCM of the denominator of each entry. Compatibility This is NOT compatible with the common (and buggy) browser Internet Explorer. It does, however, work completely fine in the newest version of Firefox. If you don't have it, you can get Firefox here. How does this work? When doing a 2x2 comparative advantage, all that must be considered is pairwise orderings, which is relatively easy to compute. However, when one begins to try doing this with more people and goods, it becomes obvious that the previous conception does not generalize well. What is really being considered here is the sum of the ratios for each person for each good. We then take those sums for a fixed good, and compare them among people. The person with the smallest sum will have the best comparative advantage over all for all of the goods. It can be proven in a rather elementary way that every person will produce exactly one good, and furthermore that productivity (in terms of comparitive advantage) is increased. We thus have our generalization. About the Making Currently this is the 1st version of Comparative Advantage Calculator. It was programmed late at night (if there are bugs, this is why) by a teenager who is in an economics class and has too much free time. It's done in plain old javascript with lots of wonderful innerHTML calls. Errors? Please report errors/wrong answers to george at elnerdo dot com (and include the data matrix).

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