Question

Imagine a company produces hand sewn face masks and face shields. Female workers can make face masks thrice the amount of face shields in an hour while the male workers can make face shields twice the amount of face masks in an hour. Assume that both male and female workers can work 8 hours a day.
Graph the production possibilities frontier of the male and female workers. Explain why it most likely has a bowed-out shape using the concept of the opportunity cost.

Answer 1

Let's see the PPF of 1 male and 1 female worker on a single graph below.

Face masks on horizontal axis and face shields on vertical axis. Blue line is female worker's PPF and orange one, male worker's.

Note: The question says 3x of masks as shields for female workers, which I have taken to be 3 per hour and 1 per hour (it may well be 6 per hour and 2 per hour, and so on ). Likewise for male workers.

In reality the PPF will be bowed-out due to the increasing opportunity cost as you move from one produce to another, whereas we have plotted straight lines here.