Executives must consider the benefits and risks of competing internationally when making decisions about whether to expand overseas. Executives also need to determine the likelihood that their companies will succeed when they compete in international markets by examining demand conditions, factor conditions, related and supporting industries, and strategy, structure, and rivalry among its domestic competitors.

For these executives that may face many uncertainties in a global marketplace, assess the three possible risks that may be faced by decision-makes seeking to expand in global markets. Analyze all three risks listed below. In your own words, analyze what conditions may be present in a country that would cause concern for these decision-makers. Explain what political risks may be present. Describe the economic and cultural risks that may also be present. You do not need to select a country. Your responses to all three risks can be a general overview of potential problems that executives want to review and assess the potential negative impacts.

Political risk refers to the potential for government upheaval or interference with business to harm an operation within a country.

• In extreme cases, a company’s assets in a country are seized by the national government. This process is called nationalization.

Economic risk refers to the potential for a country’s economic conditions and policies, property rights protections, and currency exchange rates to harm a company’s operations within a country.

Cultural risk refers to the potential for a company’s operations in a country to struggle due to differences in language, customs, norms, and customer preferences.

• Summarize concepts and importance of the functions of management.
• Summarize concepts of the scientific management, the administrative management, and behavioral management.
• Summarize concepts of the contingency theories.

First select EITHER a current event article - OR - watch a documentary that interests you and/or impacts your life. While reading the article or viewing the documentary, look for themes related to transactional and/or transformational leadership, either within the main figure, the organization, etc. Then answer the following questions:

1. Provide a brief summary of the article or documentary.
2. What was the vision, and what were the goals, of the leader or organization?
3. How did the leader(s) motivate others and foster commitment?
4. What was the outcome? Were the goals achieved? How, or, why not?
5. Would this leader be described as transactional or transformational? Provide evidence for your answer. Also, was the leader effective?

Unstructured decision

(i) Provide an example of an unstructured decision regarding inventory management or its supply chain that Target might need to make; (1 mark)

(ii) State what type of software could be used to help finalize or implement the decision and explain why that software is suitable for the decision that you have described; (1 mark)

(iii) Provide an example of how the software that you have described could be used to help with the decision example that you have provided. (1 mark)

What roles do price-offer configuration, price metrics, price fences and gain-loss framing play in segmented structures, and how do they affect a pricing decision?

For the following positions, match sources and methods to recruitment. Assume that in all cases you must use external recruitment to fill the position. Justify your choices.

a. Computer programmer

b. Maintenance worker

c. Illustrator

d. Postdoctoral researcher

e. CEO

Note: Managers must first identify the source (where prospective employees are located, for e.g colleges, universities, military personnel etc.) before choosing the method (how to attract them for e.g advertising, internships, job fairs etc).

An example is provided below to guide you to solve the question:

Computer Programmer:

Source: Potential candidates for computer programmers can be recruited from School, College, Universities, Programs etc

Method: Potential candidates for computer programming can be recruited through means of Advertisements, Internships etc

(This is just an example provided above for your clarification, the answer that i need should be properly elaborated and explained)

A retail outlet sells a perishable product for $12 per unit. The cost of the product is $6 per unit. The product not sold has the salvage value of $1.

a) Compute the overage cost and underage cost per unit.

b) If the demand follows the normal distribution with the average of 400, and the standard deviation of 100. What is the optimal order quantity to maximize the expected profit?

c) What is the optimal ordering quantity if the retailer uses the following discrete distribution for demand?

quantity 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600

probability 0.05 0.05 0.15 0.15 0.20 0.15 0.15 0.05 0.05

d) What is the profit or loss for the quantity obtained from c)?

For the next 7 questions, please refer to the following information.

Mr. Cherry owns a gas station on a highway in Vermont. In the afternoon hours, there are, on average, 30 cars per hour passing by the gas station that would like to refuel. However, because there are several other gas stations with similar prices on the highway, potential customers are not willing to wait—if they see that all of the pumps are occupied, they continue on down the road.
The gas station has three pumps that can be used for fueling vehicles, and cars spend four minutes, on average, parked at a pump (filling up their tank, paying, etc.).

f. What is the utilization of the pumps?

• A. 0.63
• B. 0.83
• C. 0.53
• D. 0.73

g. How many pumps should it have to ensure that it captures at least 98 percent of the demand that drives by the station?

• A. 6
• B. 2
• C. 4
• D. 8

The following two technologies provide support for SCM (supply chain management). For each of the following two technologies, provide an example and explain how each example could help to improve Target’s SCM:

(i) Electronic data interchange (EDI) which is a communication standard that enables business partners to exchange routine documents electronically. (Section 11.7, p. 319-320).

(ii) Extranets, which link business partners over the Internet by providing them access to certain areas of each other’s corporate intranets. (Section 11.7, p. 321-322).

discuss technology convergence and content convergence

Measuring and evaluating performance is important to managers. They need to explore how individual and performance measures and other measures can be combined to create a better tool for measuring past performance and driving the future achievement of strategic goals. The book lists a few different methods of performance measures, which include Lagging indicators, Leading indicators, Non-financial measures, Bench-marking, and Best practices. If you had a choice, pick one of these 5 measures, explain why you would use it over the others, and how you would implement it.

The Problem

Facebook has long conducted digital experiments on various aspects of its website. For example, just before the 2012 election, the company conducted an experiment on the News Feeds of nearly 2 million users so that they would see more “hard news” shared by their friends. In the experiment, news articles that Facebook users' friends had posted appeared higher in their News feeds. Facebook claimed that the news stories being shared were general in nature and not political. The stories originated from a list of 100 top media outlets from the New York Times to Fox News. Industry analysts claim that the change may have boosted voter turnout by as much as 3 percent.

Next, Facebook decided to conduct a different kind of experiment that analyzed human emotions. The social network has observed that people's friends often produce more News Feed content than they can read. As a result, Facebook filters that content with algorithms to show users the most relevant and engaging content. For one week in 2012, Facebook changed the algorithms it uses to determine which status updates appeared in the News Feed of 689,000 randomly selected users (about 1 of every 2,500 Facebook users). In this experiment, the algorithm filtered content based on its emotional content. Specifically, it identified a post as “positive” or “negative” if it used at least one word previously identified by Facebook as positive or negative. In essence, Facebook altered the regular news feeds of those users, showing one set of users happy, positive posts while displaying dreary, negative posts to another set.

Previous studies had found that the largely positive content that Facebook tends to feature has made users feel bitter and resentful. The rationale for this finding is that users become jealous over the success of other people, and they feel they are not “keeping up.” Those studies, therefore, predicted that reducing the positive content in users' feeds might actually make users less unhappy. Clearly, Facebook would want to determine what types of feeds will make users spend more time on its site rather than leave the site in disgust or despair. Consequently, Facebook designed its experiment to investigate the theory that seeing friends' positive content makes users sad.

The researchers—one from Facebook and two from academia—conducted two experiments, with a total of four groups of users. In the first experiment, they reduced the positive content of News Feeds; in the second experiment, they reduced the negative content. In both experiments, these treatment conditions were compared with control groups in which News Feeds were randomly filtered without regard to positive or negative content.

The results were interesting. When users received more positive content in their News Feed, a slightly larger percentage of words in their status updates were positive, and a smaller percentage were negative. When positivity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. The researchers concluded that the emotions expressed by friends, through online social networks, elicited similar emotions from users. Interestingly, the results of this experiment did not support the hypothesis that seeing friends' positive content made users sad.

Significantly, Facebook had not explicitly informed the participants that they were being studied. In fact, few users were aware of this fact until the study was published in a paper titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” in the prominent scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. At that point, many people became upset that Facebook had secretly performed a digital experiment on its users. The only warning that Facebook had issued was buried in the social network's one-click user agreement. Facebook's Data Use Policy states that Facebook “may use the information we receive about you . . . for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, and service improvement.” This policy led to charges that the experiment violated laws designed to protect human research subjects.

Some lawyers urged legal action against Facebook over its experiment. While acknowledging the potential benefits of digital research, they asserted that online research such as the Facebook experiment should be held to some of the same standards required of government-sponsored clinical trials. What makes the Facebook experiment unethical, in their opinion, was that the company did not explicitly seek subjects' approval at the time of the study.

Some industry analysts challenged this contention, arguing that clinical research requirements should not be imposed on Facebook. They placed Facebook's experiment in the context of manipulative advertising—on the web and elsewhere—and news outlets that select stories and write headlines in a way that is designed to exploit emotional responses by their readers.

On July 3, 2014, the privacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that Facebook had broken the law when it conducted the experiment without the participants' knowledge or consent. EPIC alleged that Facebook had deceived its users by secretly conducting a psychological experiment on their emotions.

Facebook's Response

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg defended the experiment on the grounds that it was a part of ongoing research that companies perform to test different products. She conceded, however, that the experiment had been poorly communicated, and she formally apologized. The lead author of the Facebook experiment also stated, “I can understand why some people have concerns about it (the study), and my co-authors and I are very sorry for the way the (academic) paper described the research and any anxiety it caused.”

For its part, Facebook conceded that the experiment should have been “done differently,” and it announced a new set of guidelines for how the social network will approach future research studies. Specifically, research that relates to content that “may be considered deeply personal” will go through an enhanced review process before it can begin.

The Results

At Facebook, the experiments continue. In May 2015, the social network launched an experiment called Instant Articles in partnership with nine major international newspapers. This new feature allowed Facebook to host articles from various news publications directly on its platform, an option that the social network claims will generate a richer multimedia experience and faster page-loading times.

The following month Facebook began experimenting with its Trending sidebar, which groups news and hashtags into five categories among which users can toggle: all news, politics, science and technology, sports, and entertainment. Facebook maintained that the objective is to help users discover which topics they may be interested in. This experiment could be part of Facebook's new effort to become a one-stop news distributor, an approach that would encourage users to remain on the site for as long as possible.

A 2016 report asserts that Facebook's list of top trending topics is not quite objective. For example, one source stated that Facebook's news curators routinely excluded trending stories from conservative media sites from the trending section. Facebook strongly denied the claim.

Questions

1. Discuss the ethicality and legality of Facebook's experiment with human emotions.
2. Was Facebook's response to criticism concerning that experiment adequate? Why or why not?
3. Consider the experiments that Facebook conducted in May and June 2015. Is there a difference between these two experiments and Facebook's experiment with human emotions? Why or why not?
4. Should the law require companies to inform their users every time they conduct experiments? Why or why not?