Your bakery has workers who are cookie specialists and cake specialists. After a busy weekend, your bakery is short on cookies, and you need to rebuild your cookie inventory. To do this, you decide to shift workers away from cake production and into cookie production.
As you reassign each worker, you track how many cakes you give up and how many trays of cookies you gain:

What is the marginal opportunity cost of increasing cookie production from 10 trays to 20 trays?

• A. 5 cakes
• B. 10 cakes
• C. 12 cakes
• D. 15 cakes

Answer: (C)

Verified step by step guidance

1. Identify the relevant data from the table for cookie trays increasing from 10 to 20 trays. At 10 trays, the cake loss is 3 cakes, and at 20 trays, the cake loss is 15 cakes.
2. Calculate the change in cakes lost when increasing cookie production from 10 trays to 20 trays by subtracting the cakes lost at 10 trays from the cakes lost at 20 trays.
3. Use the formula for marginal opportunity cost: \(\text{Marginal Opportunity Cost} = \frac{\text{Change in Cakes Lost}}{\text{Change in Cookie Trays}}\). Substitute the values: \(\frac{15 - 3}{20 - 10}\).
4. Simplify the fraction to find the marginal opportunity cost per tray of cookies produced, which represents how many cakes are given up for each additional tray of cookies between 10 and 20 trays.
5. Interpret the result as the total number of cakes lost when increasing cookie production by 10 trays, which is the marginal opportunity cost of increasing cookie production from 10 trays to 20 trays.