Production and Gains from Trade

Lisa Anderson, Emily Blanchard, Kelly Chaston (kechaston@davidson.edu), Charles Holt, Laura Razzolini (lrazzolini@ua.edu) and Robert Singleton (rsinglet@lmu.edu)
Additional contact information
Kelly Chaston: Department of Economics, Davidson College
Robert Singleton: Department of Economics, Loyola Marymount University

No 16, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: This paper describes a classroom game in which students make production and trade decisions. Each student represents a country and decides how much of two goods to produce, how much to exchange with a partner country, and whether to specialize in the production of one of the two goods. In introductory level classes, the game helps students understand the notion of comparative advantage in production and distinguish between gains from pure exchange and gains from specialization and trade. Class discussion focuses on the concepts of production possibility frontier, marginal productivity of inputs, and on the determination of the price ratio at which trade may occur. In advanced classes, the exercise facilitates comparisons among different models of international trade and serves as a platform from which to introduce and discuss key issues in current research and public debate.

Keywords: Classroom Experiment; International Trade; Comparative Advantage; Production Possibility Frontier; Price Ratio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A22 F10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2005-05-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.wm.edu/wp/cwm_wp16.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwm:wpaper:16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daifeng He (dhe@wm.edu this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org) and Alfredo Pereira (ampere@wm.edu).