4 coffee shops with identical products display and costs compete to find a suitable location for their stalls, at the entrance of an airport. The airport stretches linearly for 120 kms, and there are 4 gates along this stretch, each located at equal intervals. The first two gates are for departure, and the last two are for arrival. According to an observation it is noticed that only passengers at the arrival gates can afford time to sip on a cup of coffee leisurely at the gate.

i. Find out the firms' optimal decision to locate their stalls along this gateway.

ii. Find out equilibrium number of stalls and their locations.

1

1. Consider two Cournot competitive firms – with the following market demand function P=100-Q. The firms face constant marginal costs, MC₁ = 5 whereas MC₂ = 25.

However, if they merge then the marginal production costs would fall to 5.

1. Calculate the costs and benefits due to the merger for either firm.   
2. Is this merger Pareto improving for the economy? Explain.   

2. A Bertrand competition does not necessarily gravitate towards competitive prices in the equilibrium, with imperfect substitutes.

1. In this context, derive the Lerner’s Index and explain why the market power of the Bertrand competitive firm is identical to that of the Monopolist, at the equilibrium.
2. Consider the Bertrand competition with imperfect substitutes, if the firms decide to coordinate in prices. Explain with the help of the relevant Lerner’s index, the factors that affect the firms’market power under Monopoly relative to Bertrand competitive market.   

Pulp and paper production is the third largest industrial polluter to air, water, and land in the United States. The main components of pulp mill related pollution are chlorine and chlorine based materials, sulfur, hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide. With regard to water pollution, chlorine and compounds of chlorine are used in the bleaching of wood pulp, especially chemical pulps produced by the kraft process or sulfite process. Plants using elemental chlorine produced significant quantities of dioxins that are persistent organic pollutants that are one of the most toxic human-released pollutants. The used process water from a pulp mill contains a lot of organic material such as lignin and other organic material from the trees, including chlorinated organic material. The presence of these organic substances results in high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC). There are 24 paper and pulp mills located along the Lower Fox River in Wisconsin. The Fox River is the largest tributary of Lake Michigan. There are many communities along the banks of the Fox River, such as Green Bay and the Fox Cities, that are directly impacted by pollution from these pulp and paper mills. In addition, the Fox River is used almost daily for recreational activities.

(a) If the State of Wisconsin were to use a regulatory approach to control this pollution of the Fox River, what are some alternative standards it might consider? How would you rank these alternatives in terms of economic efficiency?

(b) If the State of Wisconsin were to use a Pigouvian tax approach to control this pollution of the Fox River, what are some alternative tax approaches it might consider? How would you rank these alternatives in terms of economic efficiency?

(c) What would a cap-and-trade approach look like? How would it be designed? (d) What would a Coasian solution look like? How well do you think it would work?

（Please type all the answer, do not handwriting,thanks!)

When the euro was introduced in 1999, Greece was conspicuously absent from the list of the EU member countries adopting the common currency. The country was not ready. In a few short years, however, European leaders, probably motivated by their political agenda, allowed Greece to join the euro club in 2001 although it was not entirely clear if the country satisfied the entry conditions. In any case, joining the euro club allowed the Greek government, households, and firms to gain easy access to plentiful funds at historically low interest rates, ushering in a period of robust credit growth. For a while, Greeks enjoyed what seemed to be the fruits of becoming a full-fledged member of Europe. In December 2009, however, the new Greek government revealed that the government budget deficit would be 12.7 percent for 2009, not 3.7 percent as previously announced by the outgoing government, far exceeding the EU’s convergence guideline of keeping the budget deficit below 3.0 percent of the GDP. As the true picture of the government finance became known, the prices of Greek government bonds began to fall sharply, prompting panic selling among international investors, threatening the sovereign defaults. Several years into the crisis, the Greek government debt stands at around 180 percent of GDP and the jobless rate among youth is above 50 percent. The country’s GDP declined by about 25 percent. Severe austerity measures, such as sharply raised taxes and much reduced pension benefits, were imposed on Greece as conditions for the bail- outs arranged by the EU, IMF, and the European Central Bank. In addition, people were allowed to have only restricted access to their bank deposits, to prevent bank runs. Opin- ion polls indicate that the majority of people in Germany, the main creditor nation for Greece, prefer the Greek exit from the euro zone, popularly called Grexit, while some people in Greece are demanding Grexit themselves and restoration of the national cur- rency, the drachma.

Discuss the following points: 1. What were the socioeconomic issues that caused the economic crisis in Greece in 2010?

2. Through the 2010 crisis, what do you think were the costs and benefits of staying in the euro zone for Greece?

3. What would be the measures that need to be taken to keep Greece in the euro zone in the long run?

Suppose that the market demand curve facing the incumbent firm is p = 460 - 0.5y. The firms total cost curve is c(y) = 100y. The incumbent firm is threatened by a potential entrant, which faces a fixed entry cost K in addition to the variable cost. The entrant's total cost is therefore c(y) = K + 100y .Find the limit output YL

Question 1

A digital SWOT must:

a. Be digitally-focused

b. Be credibly-sourced

c. Consider all 4Ps in the marketing mix

d.All of the above

Question 2

Art is In Bakery is an edgy gastro-bakery built to satisfy any craving. After running the website through the Website Grader, it gave the following base information: score: 49. This site could be better. 24/30 performance: page requests slowing site speed. Which best explains what should be improved in the digital SWOT for Art is In?

a. Based on this information, navigation should also be added to the rationale

b.This is a threat since there are HTTP requests slowing the site’s performance.Competitor site performance should be added

c. This is an opportunity not a strength as there is an opportunity to improve the site

d. The rationale should also include this data (Web Grader score 49, performance 24/30 and explanation). This helps justify numbers in a potential website digital objective focused on site performance

Question 3

In a digital marketing plan, data such as the total number of current social media followers, should be shown and pulled from the digital _____ to help determine measurable digital objectives.

a. Website

b. Weaknesses

c.SWOT

d.Strategy

Question 4

A key place to look for what needs to measured in a digital marketing plan is to:

a.Focus on the top 2 digital strategies

b.Use existing company measurement tools

c.Look at the digital marketing objectives

d.Use Hootsuite

Question 5

What is wrong with this digital marketing objective? To increase Art is In Bakery social media followers by 20% through Instagram and Facebook posts by September 1, 2020.

a.The strategy should be removed: ‘through Instagram and Facebook posts’

b.The time frame is incorrect

c.The strategy should be removed: ‘social media followers’

d.It’s not measurable

Suppose that output Q is produced with the production function Q = f(K;L), where K is the number of machines used, and L the number of workers used. Assuming that the price of output p and the wage w and rental rate of capital r are all constant, what would the prot maximizing rules be for the hiring of L and K? (b) What is theMRTSK;L for the following production function: Q = 10K4L2? Is this technology CRS, IRS or DRS? How do you know? (c) If the production function was Q = 4KL1=2, what are the conditional demand functions for K and L? Find the cost function C(w; r;Q) for the production function in part (a). Show 3 general properties of cost functions hold for this cost function. (d) Suppose you know the cost function is C(w; r;Q) = 2wQ + rQ 2 : Can you determine the returns-to-scale of the technology? If so, what is it?

PLEASE ANSWER AS A TEXT. DON'T WRITE ON A PAPER.

Read the article below and answer the questions.  Your answers should be written to address the question in a report format not questions and answers format. The rubrics for assessment is given  below.

Andrew Rehder, manager of 3M Co.’s respirator mask factoryin Aberdeen, S.D., got the call from headquarters on Tuesday, Jan. 21. He gathered about 20 managers and supervisors into a conference room, where they sat, unworried, less than 6 feet apart. Rehder told them that a new virus was spreading rapidly in China and that 3M was expecting demand for protective gear to jump.

The Aberdeen plant had already ramped up production of respirator masks in response to demand from first responders battling wildfires in Australia and contending with a volcano in the Philippines. Now, Rehder told his charges, Aberdeen would shift to “surge capacity.” Idle machinery installed for precisely this purpose would be activated, and many of the plant’s 650 employees would immediately start working overtime. “We knew it wouldn’t be a two-week blip, it would be longer,” Rehder says. “But I had no idea.”

This is 3M’s moment, one for which the staid, 118-year-old Minnesota manufacturing giant—the maker of Post-its, Scotch tape, touchscreen displays, and scores of other products—has been preparing for almost two decades. Coming out of the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, the company realized it wasn’t fully equipped to handle unexpected explosions of demand in the event of a crisis, or what it calls an “X factor.” It decided to build surge capacity into its respirator factories around the world.

Over the years, with X factors such as the Ebola panic and the H1N1 flu virus generating flash floods of demand, the company kept refining its emergency response. When the world started clamoring for respirator masks to help confront coronavirus, 3M was ready.

People everywhere are scrambling for ventilators, Covid-19 test kits, bleach, and toilet paper. But almost no item is as scarce—and as vital to addressing this medical emergency—as the N95 respirator masks made by 3M, Honeywell, Medicom, and a smattering of other companies. Without respirators, doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel are at increased risk of contracting the affliction they’re treating.

China, where this coronavirus originated, also happens to produce half the world’s respirators. As the outbreak spread, the Chinese government halted mask exports and demanded that all in-country manufacturers, including 3M, crank up production. Shortages swiftly developed as Covid-19 cases appeared in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., forcing health-care workers to reuse old respirators and cobble together ersatz masks from materials bought at craft stores. In America, states are bidding against one another for masks priced as much as 10 times the usual cost of 60¢ to 80¢ apiece.

3M can’t save the day on its own, but it’s promising a remarkably large contribution. The company has in two months doubled global production of N95 masks to about 100 million a month, and it’s planning to invest in new equipment to push annual mask production to 2 billion within 12 months. On March 22, Chief Executive Officer Mike Roman said in a news release that 3M had sent 500,000 respirators to hard-hit Seattle and New York City, and that it was ramping up production of hand sanitizers and disinfectants as well. Two days later, Roman said 3M would work with Ford Motor Co. to produce powered air purifying respirators, waist-mounted devices that blow air into helmets that shield wearers. Honeywell is also increasing N95 production, saying it will hire at least 500 people to expand capacity at a facility in Rhode Island.

Although businesses globally have emptied out, more than half of 3M’s 96,000 employees are still showing up for work in its factories and warehouses. “It’s been amazing,” says Rehder, who’s in the Aberdeen plant seven days a week, usually walking the floor, which is now marked with yellow tape to keep workers from violating the imaginary 6-foot infection barrier. “People are very proud to work in a place that’s making respirators, especially with the need that’s out there now.”

Pliny the Elder wrote of sulfur miners in ancient Rome using animal bladders to fashion the earliest face masks. Leonardo da Vinci imagined a mask soldiers could wear as they flung poisoned powder at enemies. Over the centuries masks evolved to counter smoke, smog, coal dust, and asbestos fibers. During the 1918 flu pandemic, San Francisco health regulators recommended that people wear masks in public places.

The N95 respirator is so named because, worn properly, it blocks at least 95% of airborne particles from entering a wearer’s mouth and nose, while still allowing respiration through the microscopically porous shell. This design protects a person from medical and other hazards; flimsier, looser-fitting surgical masks are intended to prevent the wearer from infecting others with expelled mucus, blood, or spit.

3M makes about two dozen versions of the N95, for different industrial and medical purposes. Generally they’re constructed from nonwoven materials—infinitesimal plastic strands blown together to form a random thicket that, under a microscope, “is going to look like pickup sticks,” says Nikki McCullough, 3M’s global leader for occupational health and safety. “If you’re a submicron particle, it’s quite the journey through there.” The filters can block invaders as small as 0.3 microns, or about 1/100th the thickness of a human hair. The virus is smaller than that, at about 0.125 microns, but it often travels within larger particles when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

3M started making dust respirators in 1972. Later versions became staples at construction sites, oil fields, coal mines, and factories, as well as at hospitals and disaster scenes. After the SARS outbreak sent demand soaring, Roman says, “We realized we didn’t have the ability to flex” production to adapt to the unexpected. “We had H1N1 after that, we’ve had forest fires and hurricanes, and all of those create a surge in demand.” So 3M set about rethinking the manufacturing process from one end of the supply chain to the other. Factories added assembly lines that would stand dormant until needed. Suppliers were put on alert. The company assembled emergency response teams that would leap into action whenever catastrophe beckoned: Harvey, Maria, the California wildfires.

Then came Covid-19. China’s respirator makers had largely shut down for Chinese New Year when the coronavirus started making headlines, leaving mask supply shrinking just as the need was poised to skyrocket.

“Basically, we were at the point where we needed to start every machine up. It happened pretty much instantaneously”

The supply chain team at 3M noticed early. “We monitor our demand constantly,” says Charles Avery, global value stream director for 3M’s personal safety division. “We knew we could be in for an X factor.” McCullough, who has worked on respiratory protection for much of her 23 years at 3M, began to worry when she saw Singapore and other countries taking precautionary steps even before they had many cases. “We started realizing how quickly this was spreading,” she says.

3M had another built-in advantage: Unlike many companies that have moved production to low-cost countries, it sources the materials for its respirators near its assembly plants and serves customers reasonably close by. “We make respirators in China for the China market, we make respirators in Korea for a little more than the Korea market,” Roman says. Each plant can ship respirators anywhere—pretty important in a pandemic—but day to day, a plant doesn’t rely on distant vendors subject to tariffs or export bans.

In the U.S., the facility at Aberdeen, a city of 28,000, was built in 1974. The 450,000-square-foot factory and a sister plant in Omaha together produce 400 million respirators of myriad types annually. Within the next year, they will be producing many more.

When Rehder got that call from his bosses in January, he says, “basically, we were at that point where we needed to start every machine up. It happened pretty much instantaneously. That’s what this plant does.” The facility quickly organized offsite and online job fairs. Hires had to undergo training and pass a medical exam before starting work. The payroll now counts more than 700.

Rehder has also been bringing in new equipment to build additional assembly lines. The mask components are readily available because most of them, including the filters, are made in-house. The lines that assemble respirator cups, filters, nose clips, and nose foam are loaded with robots and other automation, while humans tend to packaging and other tasks that allow more easily for social distancing. No workers have yet gotten sick, Rehder says. At home, his wife has been patient—though, he jokes, “when we try to sit down and watch a movie and I get six calls in between, I get a couple of looks.”

Tamer Abdouni is a Beirut-based consultant who facilitates the trade of, among other things, 3M respirators. Usually he can buy them for $1.25 apiece and resell them for a dime more. Lately the best purchase price he can get is $7.25. Even if he were willing to buy at that price, he says, selling respirators at multiples of his usual price during a pandemic would tarnish his reputation.

“3M makes the Rolls-Royce of masks,” Abdouni says. “People are holding stocks of masks and waiting for them to increase in value before selling them off. This is becoming very unethical. This is a war on coronavirus, and I don’t want to be a warlord.”

In the U.S., too, prices for personal protective equipment are being driven up in what has become a grim marketplace. It’s unclear whether some distributors are withholding masks as demand rises, but states are clamoring for every mask they can scrounge and must compete against one another to secure them. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on March 23 that masks the state usually buys for 85¢ now cost $7.

3M says it hasn’t raised respirator prices and can’t control what happens after it sells its products to distributors. Roman wrote to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on March 24 to offer 3M’s help in rooting out medical device counterfeiting and price gouging.

With demand soaring, 3M’s respirator sales could nearly double this year, to $600 million, according to William Blair & Co. analyst Nicholas Heymann. The company, despite its $32 billion in annual revenue, could use the boost. 3M has frustrated Wall Street in the past year with reduced earnings forecasts, sharp downturns in key markets, and thousands of layoffs. The coronavirus outbreak remains a threat to the broader supply chain and economy, and it could ultimately “make it more difficult for 3M to serve customers,” the company acknowledged in a regulatory filing this week. It also faces potential liabilities of as much as $10 billion, some analysts estimate, over its past use of PFAS, a group of chemicals that shows some associations with cancer. 3M’s shares fell last year even as the broader markets were advancing.

In Aberdeen, Rehder has more pressing things to worry about. “I just think,” he says, “as we’ve continued to see things spread across the world, it’s put more responsibility on us to make sure that every day and every minute we’re making every mask we can.” —With Riley Griffin

Q) Explain the key success and supply chain advantages 3M has that enable the company to respond to a high demand of masks amid corona virus outbreak.

How 3M Plans to Make More Than a Billion Masks By End of Year

Vesta will live only for two periods. In period 0 she will earn $50,000. In period 1 she will retire on Latmos Hill and live on her savings. Her utility function is U(C0,C1) = C0C1, where C0 is consumption in period 0 ,and C1 is consumption in period 1 .She can borrow and lend at the interest rate i= 0.10. a) Write an expression for her consumption in period 0 as a function of the parameters specified. b) Having solved her utility maximization problem, suppose the interest rate rises .Will her period 0 consumption increase, decrease, or stay the same? Explain.

Sample questions for Econ 3308-W 2020

16. In your opinion, what are the effects of legalizing marijuana in Canada, on the Canadian economy and our healthcare system?

Sample questions for Econ 3308-W 2020

7. The lack of public prescription drug coverage in our health care system makes Canada an international outlier, and erodes access to critical medications – particularly for Canadians who aren’t covered by extended health insurance through their jobs. Millions of Canadians have to pay for prescription drugs out-of-pocket. And the evidence suggests one in ten Canadians are not filling prescriptions because of costs, including more than 26% of those without extended health insurance. Comment.

Sample questions for Econ 3308-W 2020

1. In the February 2018 spring budget, the federal government announced the creation of the Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare, and by June 2018, the seven-member council was launched chaired by Eric Hoskins, MD. The final finding of the Advisory Council was published in June 2019. The report contains many proposals and 60 recommendations. Some of the highlights are listed below:

• we are recommending the federal government work with provincial and territorial governments and stakeholders to establish universal, single-payer, public pharmacare in Canada.
• We propose that the government enact national pharmacare through new legislation embodying the five fundamental principles in the Canada Health Act:

• Universal: all residents of Canada should have equal access to a national pharmacare system;
• Comprehensive: pharmacare should provide a broad range of safe, effective, evidence-based treatments;
• Accessible: access to prescription drugs should be based on medical need, not ability to pay;
• Portable: pharmacare benefits should be portable across provinces and territories when people travel or move; and
• Public: a national pharmacare system should be both publicly funded and administered.

• The National Pharmacare would start with the creation of a Canadian Drug Agency (preliminary funding for an agency was announced in the 2019 federal budget). Among the agency’s first tasks would be to create a national formulary.

1. What are the proposed timeline for these implementations and, what is the recommendation(s) for the creation of “National Formulary”.
2. Identify and explain three (out of 60) of the recommendations?
3. What was your criteria for choosing those three?
4. In your opinion, is there any subject or issue missing in this report? Could you explain?

Sample questions for Econ 3308-W 2020

1. Why should generic drugs matter to Canadians? Discuss the issue.