QUESTION 4

1. A group of potential customers were asked whether they preferred Coca-Cola products or Pepsi products. There gender was also noted on the form. The results are presented in the following table

   		Preference for Coke or Pepsi
   		Coke	Pepsi
   Gender	Female	121	92
   	Male	134	85

   What is P(Female) (Round your answer to three decimal places)?

QUESTION 5

1. Using the table from the previous problem, what is the probability of preferring Pepsi given the respondent is a male? (Round your answer to three decimal places)

QUESTION 6

1. For a normally distributed population with a mean of 40 and a standard deviation of 5 find P(38 < X < 41). Give your answer rounded to 3 decimal places.

QUESTION 7

1. A random sample of 100 employees at a company shows that 62 are female. Form a 90% confidence interval for the proportion of all employees who are female. The interval is 0.62  what margin of error? Round your answer to 3 decimal places.

In New York, which has the largest ride-for-hire fleet in the United States, licenses have been issued for 13,437 taxicabs. There are an estimated 42,000 drivers in the city, with a licensed vehicle being used by two or three drivers a day. In 2014, only 6% of cab drivers in New York were born in the United States, and 36% came from Bangladesh and Pakistan. The New York taxi fleet picks up 600,000 passengers per day. An estimated 25,000 livery cars provide for-hire service by prearrangement and carry 500,000 passengers per day. 10,000 “black cars” provide services mostly for corporate clients.

Regulators have long required that taxicabs available to be hailed on the street be licensed. The license is to ensure that the taxi service is safe and reliable, and that fares are fair. For-hire vehicles must be insured to cover drivers and passengers, meet safety standards, and (if taxicabs) have a sealed meter. Regulations also require that licensed cabs be quickly and easily identifiable. This is normally achieved by a distinctive color (e.g., yellow). Cabs must also display whether or not they are in service.

Taxicabs charge a regulated fare, set by a government agency, based on the time and distance of the trip, as measured by a meter. Some trips to and from established destinations, such as an airport, may have a fixed price and will displayed in the cab. Taxicabs are required to carry standardized meters that must be prominently displayed, are sealed and periodically checked to ensure that the proper fare is being charged. Limousine services are generally prohibited from charging fares based on time and distance, and they do not carry a meter. Typically, fees are based on time, often with a minimum billed time. The fee normally has to be agreed on in advance.

In many jurisdictions the licensing system limits the supply of taxicabs. One common variant of licensing is the medallion system that is used in cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Medallions are small metal plates attached to the hood of a taxi certifying it for passenger pickup throughout a defined area (normally metropolitan boundaries). When the medallion system was first introduced in New York in 1937, the idea was to make sure that taxi driver was not a criminal luring passengers into his vehicle. To get a medallion, the taxi service has to adhere to the regulatory requirements in that jurisdiction and be approved by the appropriate regulatory agency. Medallions may be given to individual taxi drivers who own their own cars, but more typically taxi companies that own fleets of cars acquire them. The taxi companies then lease cars and medallions to drivers on a daily or weekly basis. In some locations the driver may own the car, but lease or purchase the medallion from an agent who has acquired it. An example would be Medallion Financial, a publicly traded company that owns hundreds of medallions in New York, sells them to aspiring young cabbies, and arranges for loans to finance their purchase.

In cities that utilize a medallion system the supply of medallions has often been limited. The rationalizations for doing this include ensuring quality, guaranteeing a fair return to taxi companies, and helping to support demand for other forms of public transportation, such as buses, trains and the subway. It has also been argued that limiting the number of cabs helps to reduce congestion and pollution.

In practice, the supply of medallions has often not kept pace with growing population. In New York, Chicago and Boston for example, the number of medallions issued has barely budged since the 1930s. In New York, there were 11,787 medallions issued after World War II, a number that remained constant until 2004. By 2014 there were 13,437 medallions issued in New York.

Medallions can be traded. Thus, over time, a secondary market in medallions has developed. In this market, the price is not set by the agency issuing them, but by the laws of supply and demand. The effect of limited supply has been to drive up the price of medallions. In New York, taxi medallions were famously selling for over $1 million in 2012. In Boston the price was $625,000. In San Francisco the price was $300,000 and the city took a $100,000 commission on the sale of medallions. The average annual price of medallions surged during the 2000s. In New York, prices increased 260% between 2004 and 2012. The inflation adjusted annualized return for medallions over this time period in New York was 19.5%, compared to a 3.9% annual return for the S&P 500.

As noted above, drivers often do not own the medallions. There are three players in many taxi markets: the medallion holders (often taxi companies) who have acquired the right to operate a taxi from the regulatory agency, the taxi driver, and taxi dispatch companies. A taxi dispatch company is a middleman or broker, who typically matches available cabs with customers and takes a fee for its scheduling services. While an individual taxi driver may own a medallion, most often taxi companies own them. Tax companies own a fleet of cabs, which they lease out to drivers (with a medallion). A minority of drivers may own their own cab. In New York, about 18% of cabs were owner operated in 2014, putting most medallions in the hands of taxi companies.

In New York, regulations allow medallion owners to lease them out to drivers for 12-hour shifts. The critical problem facing a driver is that they must get access to a medallion in order to make a living. Due to this, companies that own medallions can extract high fees from drivers. There are also reports that some taxi dispatch companies use their position as schedulers to extract payment in the form of bribes from drivers in return for good shifts.

Drivers, who legally are viewed as “independent contractors”, can begin a 12-hour shift owing as much as $130 to their medallion leasing company. They may not break even until half way through their shift. One consulting company report found that in 2006 a driver’s take home pay in New York for a 12-hour shift averaged $158. In 2011, the New York transportation authority calculated that it was $96. A study of taxi drivers in Los Angeles found that drivers worked on average 72 hours a week for a median take home wage of $8.39 an hour. The LA drivers were paying $2000 in leasing fees per month to taxi companies. None of the drivers in the LA study had health insurance provided by their companies, and 61% were completely without health insurance. Given the compensation, it is perhaps not surprising that some drivers can be rude, impatient, and prone to drive fast and take poor care of their cabs.

The LA study noted that because city officials heavily regulate the taxi business, taxi companies are active politically, paying lobbyist to advocate their interests and contributing to the campaign funds of local politicians. The same is true in New York, where the medallion owners trade association, the Metropolitan Taxi Board of Trade, lobbies hard to influence public policy. In 2011, for example, medallion owners were initially able to block plans to create a fleet of green “Boro” cabs to serve New York’s outer boroughs. They argued that doing so would drive down the price of their medallions. In June 2013, however, the New York Supreme Court overruled lower court rulings and allowed the licensing of Boro cabs to go ahead. The intention now is to issue 18,000 new licenses to green cabs. These cabs, however, will not be able to pick up passengers in lower Manhattan, which remains the territory of yellow cabs.

Analyze the competitive structure of the taxi market such as New York prior to the introduction of Uber?

Case 2-22 Plantwide versus Departmental Overhead Rates; Pricing [LO2-1, LO2-2, LO2-3, LO2-4]

“Blast it!” said David Wilson, president of Teledex Company. “We’ve just lost the bid on the Koopers job by $2,000. It seems we’re either too high to get the job or too low to make any money on half the jobs we bid.”

Teledex Company manufactures products to customers’ specifications and uses a job-order costing system. The company uses a plantwide predetermined overhead rate based on direct labor cost to apply its manufacturing overhead (assumed to be all fixed) to jobs. The following estimates were made at the beginning of the year:

Jobs require varying amounts of work in the three departments. The Koopers job, for example,
would have required manufacturing costs in the three departments as follows:

Required:

1. Using the company's plantwide approach:

a.Compute the plantwide predetermined rate for the current year.

b.Determine the amount of manufacturing overhead cost that would have been applied to the Koopers job.

2. Suppose that instead of using a plantwide predetermined overhead rate, the company had used departmental predetermined overhead rates based on direct labor cost. Under these conditions:

a.Compute the predetermined overhead rate for each department for the current year.

b.Determine the amount of manufacturing overhead cost that would have been applied to the Koopers job.

4. Assume that it is customary in the industry to bid jobs at 150% of total manufacturing cost (direct materials, direct labor, and applied overhead).

a.What was the company’s bid price on the Koopers job using a plantwide predetermined overhead rate?

b.What would the bid price have been if departmental predetermined overhead rates had been used to apply overhead cost?

Garrison 16e Rechecks 2017-08-08, 2018-08-21, 2018-08-31, 2018-09-04, 2018-09-27

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Problem 2. The US National Park Service (NPS) believes that airborne sulfur pollution and acid rain has significantly reducing the water quality in several lakes and streams in the Adirondacks State Park in NY. Many of these water bodies are considered biologically ‘dead.’ Coal fired power plants in the Midwest contribute most of the pollution. If 70% of the sulfur pollution was removed, the NPS believes that many of the lakes and streams would return to their natural biological state. The costs and benefits associated with this project are as follows:

1. Construction cost for sulfur removal equipment = $300 million for each of the first three years of the project. (During these three years there are no other costs associated with the project.)

2. Operation and maintenance costs = $ 85 million per year (These costs begin to accrue once the project comes on-line in the fourth year. They continue to accrue over the entire life of the equipment, i.e., through the 20th year.)

3. Estimated increase in revenues earned by the Adirondacks State Park = $ 150 million per year (These additional revenues accrue so long as the sulfur reduction equipment is operating.)

4. Reduced incidence of acid rain in the Adirondacks Park area valued at: = $ 2 million per year. (These benefits begin accruing once the project comes on-line and are assumed to continue over an infinitely long time period.) Assume that the discount rate is 3% per year.

Sensitivity analysis: To determine the sensitivity of your conclusion regarding whether the project makes economic sense or not, (a) evaluate the project at a discount rate of 5% per year, and (b) assume that the estimated increase in Park revenues is $130 million per year instead of $150 million per year. You can assume a discount rate of 3% per year for this. What is your conclusion now?

Policy recommendation: Based on all your calculations, what is your overall recommendation regarding this project?

PROBLEM IV Binghamton University is building a recreation center. The estimated construction cost is $12 million with annual staffing and maintenance costs of $750,000 over the 20-year life of the project (ie, t = 0, 1, 2, …, 19). At the end of the life of the project (ie, at t = 19), Binghamton expects to be able to sell the land for $4 million, though the amount could be as low as $2 million and as high as $5 million. Analysts estimate the first-year benefits (accruing at the end of the year of the first year, ie at t =1) to be $1.2 million. They expect the annual benefit to grow in real terms due to increases in population and income. Their prediction is an annual growth rate of 4 percent, but it could be as low as 1 percent or as high as 6 percent. Analysts also estimate the real discount rate for Binghamton to be 6 percent per year, though it could be a percentage point lower or higher.

1. Calculate the present value of net benefits for this project using the analysts’ predictions.

2. Investigate the sensitivity of the present value of net benefits to alternative projections within the ranges given by the analysts. Change only one assumption at a time, and try all possible combinations of assumptions (there are 27 possible combinations).

3. Based on your analysis on parts 1 and 2 of this problem, do you think Binghamton University should build the recreation center?

You are one of the potential investors in a business . Explain how you would go about evaluating the proposed investment. Use at least three different methods of evaluating investments. Describe the three different methods, and explain which one of these methods used is the best for this particular decision. Motivate your answer. Describe any potential negative issues of the chosen method which you should be aware of.

Answer must be between 1500-2000 word counts

11. Which ofthe following statements correctly describesthe difference between ATP and the
nucleotides used during DNA synthesis?
A. ATP contains three high-energy bonds; the nucleotides havetwo.
B. The nucleotides have the sugar deoxyribose; ATP has the sugar ribose.
C. The nucleotides have two phosphate groups; ATP has three phosphate groups.
D. ATP isfound only in human cells; the nucleotides are found in all animal and plant cells.

1. Using the market for custom made cloth face masks as an example, answer the following questions.

1. Explain the difference between a change in the quantity demanded and a change in demand. Illustrate your answers with a diagram.
2. In this market, describe three things that could cause an increase in demand.
3. In class we discussed at least four different determinants of supply. Using the market for face masks as an example, describe three of these four determinants of supply and how they might change to cause an increase in supply.

The header of a Python function is shown below:

def result(one, two, three = 3, four)

(a) How do we call the situation with the third parameter in this header?

(b) Indicate the method of correspondence between formal and actual parameters

that is used in the following function call:

result(four = 14, two = 22, one = 1, three = 33)

(c) Explain what is wrong with the following function call:

result(14, four = 44, 2, 3)

4. Listed below are the combined city – highway fuel consumption ratings (in miles per gallons) for different cars measured in old rating system and cars in a new rating system introduced in 2008 (based on data from USA today). A. Construct a 90 percent confidence interval of the difference in the ratings of cars. (Use 3 decimal places) (10 pts) Old Rating: 16 18 27 17 33 28 33 18 24 19 18 27 22 18 20 29 19 27 20 21 New Rating: 15 16 24 15 29 25 29 16 22 17 16 24 20 16 18 26 17 25 18 19 B. Based on the interval is there a reason to believe that there is a difference in the ratings of the two cars? C. Is there any significant difference in the old and new ratings of cars? Use appropriate hypothesis test to answer this question.