Robert F. Mulligan, Ph.D. WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF BUSINESS Department of Economics, Finance, & International Business

GEOFFREY GERDES'S INSTRUCTIONAL JAVA APPLETS Geoff Gerdes designed these instructional applets which illustrate various economic principles or statistical distributions.

Geoff Gerdes UCLA Home Page

Tour of Instructional JAVA Applets

Consumer choice: Utility maximization subject to a budget constraint  The slides allow you to adjust the price of the two goods x and z, allowing you to see how the utility maximizing choice changes as the budget constraint changes to reflect new prices.  This assumes a two good world.

Derivation of an individual consumer's demand curve  Holding the price of good z constant, which is equivalent to a ceteris paribus assumption, the price of good x is allowed to vary.  This shows why normal preferences lead to downward-sloping demand curves for an individual consumer.  The market demand curve is arrived at by horizontal additon of all the individual demand curves.

Elasticity and total revenue with a straight-line demand curve  Assuming the downward-sloping demand curve is a straight line, the slides can be adjusted to reflect different price-quantity combinations.  Because the demand curve is a mathematical function, when you change price, quantity changes, and vice-versa.  The applet calculates the demand elasticity for each point on the demand curve, and graphs the seller's total revenue.

Edgeworth box with Cobb-Douglas utility maximizers  This applet shows how two consumers can benefit from trading with each other.  It assumes a two-good world.  Given their resource endowment, the amount of the two goods each player starts with, and their preferences, they can each reach higher indifference curves, representing higher levels of utility, by trading with each other.

Perfect competition: Firm cost functions and profit maximization problem  This applet shows the u-shaped cost curves for a hypothetical firm.  In perfect competition the firm is a price taker.  The applet shows how the firm will respond as the price changes, and can be used to identify the shut-down and break-even levels of output, the firm supply curve, the profit-maximizing output level at each price, and the level of profit at each price.

Gosset's ("Student's") t-distribution  The slide allows you to adjust the degrees of freedom for the t-distribution.  The normal distribution, which has infinite degrees of freedom, is shown for comparison.  5% critical values are shown.

Fisher's F-distribution  The slides allow you to adjust the numerator and denominator degrees of freedom for the F-distribution.  The applet shows the 5% critical values.