Question

(2) You need a word

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processing package for the personal computer in your office. Because your employer will pay for the package you are not concerned about the

cost, but you would like a package which is as easy to use as possible and which also has a wide range of functions such as a thesaurus, spell checker and graphics.

After discussing the matter with a friend who is something of an expert in this field, you identify seven potential packages and allocate values to them to reflect their

ease of use and available facilities. These values are shown below (0 = worst, 100 = best).

package	ease of use	facilities available
super quill	100	30
easywrite	90	70
woodright	50	20
lexico	0	40
ultraword	20	100
keywrite	40	0
fastwrite	85	55

(a) Plot each package's value for 'ease of use' and 'facilities available' on a graph and hence determine the packages which lie on the efficient frontier.

(b) Suppose that you judge that a switch from a package with the least facilities available to one with the most facilities is only 60% as attractive as a switch from a

package which is the least easy to use to one which is the most easy to use. Assuming that mutual preference independence exists between the two attributes,

which package should you choose?

(c) After some reflection you realize that the extra facilities available on a package will be of little value to you if they are going to be difficult to use. What does this imply about your method of analysis in (b)?

Solve the question in excel or on paper.

Answer 1

Easywrite and Fastwrite seems to be the most efficient packages because they have above 80 'ease of use score' and above 50 facilities available as seen from the graph.

We should choose the package which is most easy to use over the package which has a large number of facilities available because if a person does not know how to use a package then all its functionality is rendered unuseful and on the other hand if a package is easy to use then complex work can also be done on it.

c)

According to there is a dependency between 2 given attributes, they are not mutually preference independent. The method of analysis in (b) is inappropriate. The weighted of each attribute for all packages should not be the same.

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