── ── Strategy
Comparative Advantage
Mutually beneficial specialization depends on relative productivity, not absolute. Even if you are better than everyone else at every task, you gain by focusing on tasks where your opportunity-cost ratio is lowest and delegating the rest. The right question is not "am I better at X than them?" but "am I better at X relative to Y compared to how…
How it works
Step 1 — Producers and tasks: name Producer 1, Producer 2, Task A, Task B, time horizon.
Step 2 — Productivity: estimate value-per-hour (or units/time) for each producer at each task.
Step 3 — Opportunity-cost ratios: Producer 1's OC of Task A = Task B output forgone per unit of Task A. Repeat for Producer 2. Lower OC = comparative advantage in that task.
When to use it
- user says 'should I do this myself or delegate,' 'I'm the best at X so I should do it,' 'should we outsource or build in-house,' 'how should we divide work on the team,' 'is it worth hiring someone for this.'
When not to use it
the situation is genuinely single-task with no trade-off; the user is asking about competitive strategy between companies (use Porter's Five Forces instead).
Worked example
Ricardo 1817 England-Portugal + Modern Applications
Ricardo's 1817 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was the first systematic statement of the theorem. His example used England and Portugal, cloth and wine. Suppose:
Install this skill (free, MIT)
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills