A) A large insurance company offers group disability insurance products to businesses, which in turn offer the product to their employees. Pricing policies to prevent a loss is difficult. Since it is difficult to know exactly which employees are more prone to file claims, it is hard to price policies accurately. If policies are priced too low, high-risk clients will be attracted and losses incurred. If policies are priced too high, not enough clients will be attracted. Compounding this factor is the fact that companies are motivated to exaggerate their safety in order to negotiate a lower price.  

What problem is being described in this scenario?  

What types of activities can the insurance company undertake to distinguish between customers with a low probability versus a high probability of claiming?

B)The large accommodation chains like Marriott, Accor do not run individual hotels themselves but rather lease the naming rights to a franchisee who leases the building from a property trust. What are the main advantages for hotel chains of not directly operating the hotel? What are the main disadvantages of the franchisee not owning the building?   

The food and beverage manager of the Glitz Hotel just got a great deal on beverages for the bar. Instead of buying large 5L containers for $25 each, they instead were able to purchase 1,000 cases of 12-packs of 500ml cans for $26,640. Beverages are served in 500ml servings. Usually, they sell 800 beverages over a weekend, but they actually sold 900 this past weekend. However, 20 customers had to be refunded due to problems with the cans.

Direct labour costs are driven by the number of beverages served. A typical weekend requires four servers each working two 8-hour shifts at $12/hour. At the end of the weekend, actual labour costs were $816.50 for 71 hours.

Required:

A   Calculate the following variances:

Material rate

Material quantity

Direct Labour rate

Direct labour efficiency

B   Briefly explain the variances to the hotel manager, and explain if the variances are somehow interlinked. Assess the special purchase and identify other factors that should be considered.

Case 4

When Disney opened its $4.4 billion Euro Disneyland outside Paris, concerns over the park’s impact on French culture were expressed. To begin with, the French dedicate Sundays only to family outings. In addition, they are unaccustomed to snacking and eat promptly at 12:30, which creates bottlenecks at parks and restaurants. Disney learned that French employees objected to providing the friendly greetings and smiles expected of all amusement park workers. They then hired multilingual employees from all over Europe because Disney’s goal was to attract people from all countries of Europe. A complaint of European investors was that rigid U.S. management style did not take into account the values and customs of the people it intended to attract. For example, Europeans often bring their own lunches and do not spend money at the park’s gourmet restaurants and hotels. The park initially lost money after it opened in 1992. Discuss the course of action Disney could take to accommodate the values and customs of the people it hopes to attract.

2 pages

Gale, McLean, and Lux are partners of Burgers and Brew Company with capital balances as follows: Gale, $88,000; McLean, $77,000; and Lux, $151,000. The partners share profit and losses in a 3:2:5 ratio. McLean decides to withdraw from the partnership. Prepare General Journal entries to record the May 1, 2020, withdrawal of McLean from the partnership under each of the following unrelated assumptions:

a. McLean sells his interest to Freedman for $172,000 after Gale and Lux approve the entry of Freedman as a partner (where McLean receives the cash personally from Freedman).

b. McLean gives his interest to a son-in-law, Park. Gale and Lux accept Park as a partner.
c. McLean is paid $77,000 in partnership cash for his equity.

d. McLean is paid $136,000 in partnership cash for his equity.

e. McLean is paid $31,250 in partnership cash plus machinery that is recorded on the partnership books at $119,000 less accumulated depreciation of $87,000. (Round final answers to 2 decimal places.)

4. Emily likes bird watching. Every year she takes a vacation to a park famous for

its rare birds. She goes there for 10 days. From her past experience, she knows that on

average she can get 6 good sightings a day. A very good day for her is a day with at least

10 good sightings. Assume Poisson distribution of the number of good sightings on any day

(independently of other days).

a) What is the probability that she can get at least one very good day this time?

b) What is the expected number of very good days during this vacation?

c) What is the expected number of days she has to go bird watching in this park before

getting one very good day?

d) Extra credit: What should the average number of good sightings per day be so that

the probability that she gets at least one very good day during this vacation be at least 0.9?

Suppose that you are responsible for making arrangements for a medical convention and you have been charged with finding a city for the convention that has the least expensive hotel rooms. You have narrowed your choices to Atlanta and Houston. The data set contains a sample of hotel room prices from Atlanta and Houston. Based on the sample data, can you conclude that the mean price of a hotel room in Atlanta is lower than one in Houston? Perform a two-sample t-test with a significance level of α = 0.05. Use Excel to show your work.

1. Create a box plot of the data.

2. State the null and alternative hypotheses. Is this a left-tailed, right-tailed or two-tailed test?

3. Compute the following. Assume unequal variance and df = 66. The t.test() function can be used to compute the p-value directly.

Do you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis? Whats the conclusion?

Suppose that you are responsible for making arrangements for a medical convention and you have been charged with finding a city for the convention that has the least expensive hotel rooms. You have narrowed your choices to Atlanta and Houston. The data set contains a sample of hotel room prices from Atlanta and Houston. Based on the sample data, can you conclude that the mean price of a hotel room in Atlanta is lower than one in Houston? Perform a two-sample t-test with a significance level of α = 0.05. Use Excel to show your work.

1. Create a box plot of the data.

2. State the null and alternative hypotheses. Is this a left-tailed, right-tailed or two-tailed test?

3. Compute the following. Assume unequal variance and df = 66. The t.test() function can be used to compute the p-value directly.

Do you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis? Whats the conclusion?

Your professor is going on vacation. He has narrowed down a list of potential hotels, but he is still overwhelmed by the data. He loves great food and wants to do all the activities at the resort.

1. Develop two unique ways to display the data (two unique types of charts) to show him where he should stay.

2. Recommend the best way to present the data. Write a narrative summary of what hotel you recommend based on the data visualization and the tradeoffs that you observe.

Arts Centre Parking

The following information is required for Questions 5–8:

It is said that "Australia has one of the world's great opera houses; unfortunately, the outside is in Sydney and the inside is in Melbourne."

The opera house in Melbourne is called the Arts Centre, and it has 250 seats. Demand for a typical opera is Q = 400 – 2P, but there is only demand so long as the opera patrons can park for free beneath the Arts Centre. (Opera patrons are lazy, and don't like to walk. They are also selfish, so each patron drives in a car all by himself or herself.)

There are 300 parking places beneath the Arts Centre, and the parking is owned and operated by the Arts Centre. Suppose there are no other uses for the parking places.

What price do you charge for the opera tickets? Answer is $100

For Questions 6–8 assume that the Arts Centre is very conveniently located in the middle of town, so its parking lot is very popular. They can sell as many parking places as they want for $20 per night. However, a Melbourne city ordinance prohibits them from charging more than $20 per night for parking. The system at the Arts Centre is to allow opera patrons to park for free, if they show their ticket, and to allow a certain number of "outside people" (non-opera-attenders) to park at $20 per night.

Q1) How many parking places do they set aside for "outside people", on an opera night?

Q2) Suppose that the very popular opera "Carmen" is showing tonight. Demand for that opera is Q = 600 - 2P.
How many parking places does the Arts Centre allow "outside people" to use, now?

Q3) Now what is the price of an opera ticket?

Religious Rowan worked for many years for a hotel restaurant as a waitstaff person. The restaurant had a family-style menu and was closed on Sundays. The restaurant was owned and operated by the hotel and primarily served a family oriented clientele. The restaurant was acquired by a national chain that changed the dynamic of the restaurant, making it into a bar and pub that was open 7 days per week.

Religious Rowan is a devout conservative churchgoer and does not believe in working on Sundays, because that is a time for church, nor does Rowan believe in the consumption of alcohol. Rowan told the new employers that due to religious beliefs, working any Sunday shifts and/or taking orders and serving alcohol to clients would be impossible.

The employer agreed that Rowan could always have Sundays off but insisted that Rowan get certified by the state to be able to sell alcohol as that was a new requirement of the waitstaff position. Rowan refused, and because there were always several other waitstaff personnel available that could take and serve alcohol orders, the restaurant said that was fine, because Rowan was otherwise an excellent employee.

Rowan was able to serve for 3.5 years in the same role with the accommodations of not working on Sundays or being involved in selling or serving alcohol without a problem. However, a new restaurant manager came in and determined that in order for the restaurant to improve its efficiency of operations, which was a goal the new manager was hired to implement, Rowan could still skip Sunday shifts but could no longer be accommodated by not participating in the sale of alcohol to customers as that pulled other waitstaff off of their assigned tables and was not perfectly efficient. Rowan refused to get licensed to sell alcohol or to serve it and was subsequently fired for insubordination. Rowan then sued for the failure of the hotel to accommodate her religious beliefs. How should the court rule and why?