Author: Saim Khalid

• Concept: If the price of a good falls, people buy more of it. If the price rises, people buy less.
• Why? Because of substitution effect (people switch to cheaper goods) and income effect (lower prices make people feel richer).

Example:

• If pizza costs $10, people buy 100 pizzas.
• If price drops to $6, demand rises to 150 pizzas.

Graph:

• Price on Y-axis, Quantity on X-axis.
• Demand curve slopes downward (left to right).

Key Insight: Demand curves always slope downward due to inverse relationship between price and demand.

Vi Hart; Nicky Case

A well-designed interactive web page, with succinct text and a succession of playable cartoon simulations, explains Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Schelling’s work on dynamic models of segregation. It uses animated shapes rather than people, and users can introduce different preferences to the characters and see the results.

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Graphic representations of various concepts in microeconomics (e.g. monopoly, consumer and producer surplus, Edgeworth Box), macroeconomics (e.g. Solow growth model, Keynesian cross, Lorenz Curve and Gini coefficient), game theory (e.g. Nash equilibrium in 3×3 game, binomial tree) and financial theory (e.g. net present value, price-yield curve). Submitted by various authors in Mathematica, with short explanation of underlying theory, and options to manipulate the diagram by changing the different variables. To do this, and view the demonstrations in the browser, requires download of the Mathematica Player browser plug-in which is available for Windows, Linux or Mac. These form part of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, hosted on the website of independent scientist Stephen Wolfram as a development of his popular Mathematica program.

Franz Prante, Chemnitz University of Technology & Karsten Kohler, University of Leeds

Open source repository of common macroeconomic models in the R language. Each page describes and spells out the model, provides example code for numerical simulations, and illustrative output and analysis. The approach is spelled out in a “How to simulate economic models” section. The content of the site is in a GitHub repository.

More than twenty interactive workbooks for Microeconomics, Macroeconomics and Econometrics, created using the Wolfram programming language. Each chart illustrates a concept or model, and gives many parameters that the reader can adjust to see the resulting changes. The interactive workbooks can be viewed online or downloaded to the reader’s computer to run in the free Wolfram player. These were created by Angulo while still an undergraduate at Warwick.

Ten Excel spreadsheets, each with a worksheet in Microsoft Word format, are held here. Each spreadsheet takes several different inputs from the student and the worksheets give specific guidance on how to use them. Topics are: Working with Lines, Market Equilibrium, Market with tax, Cardinal Utility, Consumer Choice, Income and Substitution Effects, Products and Costs, Competitive Firm, Competitive Industry, and Monopoly.

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Graphic representations of various concepts in microeconomics (e.g. monopoly, consumer and producer surplus, Edgeworth Box), macroeconomics (e.g. Solow growth model, Keynesian cross, Lorenz Curve and Gini coefficient), game theory (e.g. Nash equilibrium in 3×3 game, binomial tree) and financial theory (e.g. net present value, price-yield curve). Submitted by various authors in Mathematica, with short explanation of underlying theory, and options to manipulate the diagram by changing the different variables. To do this, and view the demonstrations in the browser, requires download of the Mathematica Player browser plug-in which is available for Windows, Linux or Mac. These form part of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, hosted on the website of independent scientist Stephen Wolfram as a development of his popular Mathematica program.

A set of configurable, graphically appealing, online interactive games that work across laptops, iOS (Apple) and Android devices. Instructors can customise the games, or use default settings, and students join by entering a class code. The instructor gets a graphical analysis of outcomes immediately at the end of the session, for use in class discussion. The site has course guides that suggest how to sequence the games in different Economics courses, and each game has references to relevant papers. The site’s apps can also be used to administer individual survey or assessment questions online.

Economics-games.com

A set of interactive games and simulations that are played in the browser. The tutor chooses a game and a number of players, then is given unique logins to distribute to learners. 14 games are played against the computer. In the other 47 games, learners play against each other.

Christopher R. Makler, Stanford University

Online textbook using interactive graphs created by Makler. Twenty-four chapters, each with multiple graphs, are split into six sections: Scarcity and Choice, Consumer Theory, the Theory of the Firm, Competitive Equilibrium, Exchange, and Public Economics. It is possible and allowed to embed the graphs in other sites. As of 2023, this is a work-in-progress, but with a lot of content.