Price competition is intense in the fast-food, air travel, and personal computer industries. Discuss a recent situ- ation in which companies had to meet or beat a rival’s price in a price-competitive industry. Did you benefit from this situation? Did it change your perception of the companies and/or their products?

When an organization has decided that they want someone else to provide goods or services, they will outsource to another organization. The organization/party that is purchasing the goods or services is known as the?

1 With regard to Arousal Theory, what is the Inverted U Function (Yerkes-Dodson Law)? Explain?

2 . Describe proposed physiological/ neurological functions of dreaming.

Describe what Weber’s, Fechner’s, and Steven’s Laws have in common and how they are different.

Explain Briefly Components of Strain Energy.

Microeconomics

Construct Production Possibility Frontiers graphs with constant opportunity costs for United States and Chile.  Assume there are two goods in these economies: Wheat and Copper.  If the U.S. puts all of its resources into the production of wheat, it can produce 300,000 units of wheat; if it puts all of its resources into the production of Copper, it can produce 150,000 units of copper. If the Chile puts all of its resources into the production of wheat, it can produce 100,000 units of wheat; if it puts all of its resources into the production of Copper, it can produce 100,000 units of copper.  

            a. Determine the opportunity costs of both countries to produce both wheat and copper.

b. Which country has the absolute advantage in the production of each good? Explain why.

            c. Which country has the comparative advantage in the production of each good? Explain why.

Operating Leverage

Beck Inc. and Bryant Inc. have the following operating data:

a. Compute the operating leverage for Beck Inc. and Bryant Inc. If required, round to one decimal place.

b. How much would income from operations increase for each company if the sales of each increased by 10%? If required, round answers to nearest whole number.

c. The difference in the increases  of income from operations is due to the difference in the operating leverages. Beck Inc.'s higher  operating leverage means that its fixed costs are a larger  percentage of contribution margin than are Bryant Inc.'s.

Functions of Signal Transduction (select any/all that apply):

1. a second messenger

2. Cell-cell communication

3. Cell’s response to environment

4. Intracellular homeostatsis- internal communication

develop a programming code in FORTRAN 77 software for solar assisted air source water heat pump inline connected with bry air dehumidifier and pulse tube cryocooler

1. Your sales or revenue forecast will be an important and key element for any business plan. If you were to forecast the sales for Year 1 through Year 3 what would be the variables you would need to consider and where might you go to research and obtain the data on which to base your forecast?

A project to build a new bridge seems to be going very well since the project is well ahead of schedule and costs seem to be running very low. A major milestone has been reached where the first two activities have been totally completed and the third activity is 60 percent complete. The planners were only expecting to be 50 percent through the third activity at this time. The first activity involves prepping the site for the bridge. It was expected that this would cost $1,420,000 and it was done for only $1,300,000. The second activity was the pouring of concrete for the bridge. This was expected to cost $10,500,000 but was actually done for $9,000,000. The third and final activity is the actual construction of the bridge superstructure. This was expected to cost a total of $8,500,000. To date they have spent $5,000,000 on the superstructure. Calculate the schedule variance, schedule performance index, and cost index for the project to date. How is the project going?

A.) 1. Write a loop that prints the numbers 1-25i.e.

B.) 1 2 3 4... 252. Write a loop that prints all the even numbers between 1 and 50i.e. 2 4 6 8... 483.

C.) Create a list of the following fruits: oranges, apples, grapes and mangos and cherries. Write a loop that prints out every other fruit starting with oranges.i.e. oranges grapes and cherries.

As discussed in this chapter, the characteristics of ser- vices affect the development of marketing mixes for ser- vices. Choose a specific service and explain how each marketing mix element could be affected by these ser- vice characteristics.

H&M, a Fashion Giant, Has a Problem: $4.3 Billion in Unsold Clothes

In the world of fashion retailing, where shopping is fast moving online and stores try to keep inventories closely matched to sales, even a small stack of unsold clothes can be a bad sign. What about a $4.3 billion pile of shirts, dresses and accessories? That is the problem facing H&M, the Swedish fashion retailer, which is struggling with a mounting stack of unsold inventory.

H&M outlined the buildup in its latest quarterly report on Tuesday, prompting questions of whether the company is able to adapt to the fierce competition and changing consumer demands reshaping the global apparel market. Signs of its expanding unsold inventory began emerging last year, when it reported an unexpected quarterly drop in sales. The decline was the first in two decades, a period in which H&M expanded from a lone women’s wear store west of Stockholm to a gargantuan network of 4,700 stores around the world.

Foot traffic in the past year fell as customers eschewed crowded shop floors in favor of online shopping, or lower-cost offerings elsewhere, a challenge hitting a wide array of “fast fashion” retailers. On Tuesday, the company said the pile of unsold stock had grown 7 percent in the past year and was now worth nearly 35 billion Swedish kronor. The scale of the problem illustrates H&M’s vast size — as one of the world’s largest clothing manufacturers, it produces hundreds of millions of items each year. There are so many that a power plant in Vasteras, the town where H&M founded its first store, relies partly on burning defective products the retailer cannot sell to create energy.

Analysts have been pressing Karl-Johan Persson, the company’s chief executive, over the issue. Inventory levels were up, Mr. Persson said, because H&M was opening 220 new stores and expanding its e-commerce operations, and so needed to fill the racks. Critics, however, blamed poor inventory management and underwhelming product offerings, prompting once-loyal shoppers to take their wallets elsewhere. The company said operating profit fell 62 percent in the three months through February, sending its shares to their lowest closing price since 2005 on the Stockholm stock exchange.

It is the latest in a series of issues for H&M. The company had to close stores in South Africa and faced a social media backlash after it ran an ad in January showing a black child model wearing a hooded sweatshirt that said, “Coolest monkey in the jungle.” Also, it and other retailers in Europe are girding themselves for an expected push by Amazon into clothing retailing, one that Amazon has already been making in the United States.

Since the early 2000s, business has largely boomed for fast fashion retailers such as ASOS, H&M and Inditex, which owns Zara. They profited off their ability to generate, at a vast scale, rapid translations of runway fashions into low-priced clothing and accessories. But while luxury brands have enjoyed a rebound in fortunes in recent months, fueled by millennial appetite and a recovery in demand from the lucrative Chinese market, mass-market companies have had to deal with enormous changes. In the digital era, the challenges around offering trendy apparel before it goes out of style have mounted, particularly as growing numbers of shoppers choose to buy from their smartphones and become more quality conscious. ASOS is an online-only retailer, and Inditex has managed to ramp up its digital sales. But H&M, which also owns brands like Cos, & Other Stories and Arket, has fallen behind the pack.

Analysts have been downbeat on the Swedish company’s outlook. Rahul Sharma, founder of Neev Capital, called H&M “a slow-motion wreck” after the release of the first-quarter results. Analysts at the Swiss bank UBS said in a note to investors this month that they had come away from an H&M presentation in November “with no clear view on why focus on the core customer had been lost, and what was being done to fix it.” H&M has insisted it has a plan, saying it would slash prices to reduce the stockpile and slow its expansion in stores. It said it hoped its online business would expand 25 percent this year. Still, Mr. Persson, a grandson of H&M’s founder, acknowledged that the rapid transformation of the industry was weighing on his company. “The start of the year,” he said, “has been tough.”

10. How do the concepts of price sensitivity and elasticity of demand impact the sale of clothing & accessories at H&M. Explain your thinking with examples.

8. How H&M could leverage the use of technology to enhance its online and offline channels? List and briefly describe three trends that are currently having the greatest impact on the future of retailing.

6. H&M needs to work on their integrated marketing communications plan, they need to build out a plan for changing people’s behaviors and adding a larger audience. What do you believe are the three best tools for this? Explain how your various tools would work to capture the audience and what you would do to maximize profits. Please provide more details.