c) Which investment level should the marketing department choose if they want tomaximize expected values? Assume that the probability that the market share isless than 1% is 0.3, that the probability that market share is between 1 and 4% is0.5, and that the probability that market share is more than 4% is 0.2.Your answer:Your steps/process to get to the answer:d) If the marketing department wants o maximize expected values, what is themaximum amount they should be willing to spend to get more information about themarket share?Your answer:Your steps/process to get to the answer: To solve:LowHighThe marketing department of a soft drink company wishes to determine themaximum expected payoff from introducing a new crystal-clear drink. Thedepartment considers two investment levels ("Low" and "High") to choose betweenand regards market share as the key uncertainty that determines ultimate payoffs.These payoffs, depending on the choice of investment level and possible marketShare, are given in the table belowInvestment Level< 1%300,000-300,000Market Share1% -4%400,000300,000a) Which investment level should the marketing department choose if they areextremely optimistic about the market share?Your answer:Your steps/process to get to the answer:b) Which investment level should the marketing department choose if they want tominimize maximum regret?Your answer:Your steps/process to get to the answer:> 4%450,0002,000,000

NOTE: We are allowed to do the first three sub-parts only. Optimistic decision-making is a method…

Answered: a) Which investment level should the…

Practical Management Science

6th Edition

ISBN:9781337406659

Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Publisher:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Chapter10: Introduction To Simulation Modeling

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 33P: W. L. Brown, a direct marketer of womens clothing, must determine how many telephone operators to...

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An automobile manufacturer is considering whether to introduce a new model called the Racer. The profitability of the Racer depends on the following factors: The fixed cost of developing the Racer is triangularly distributed with parameters 3, 4, and 5, all in billions. Year 1 sales are normally distributed with mean 200,000 and standard deviation 50,000. Year 2 sales are normally distributed with mean equal to actual year 1 sales and standard deviation 50,000. Year 3 sales are normally distributed with mean equal to actual year 2 sales and standard deviation 50,000. The selling price in year 1 is 25,000. The year 2 selling price will be 1.05[year 1 price + 50 (% diff1)] where % diff1 is the number of percentage points by which actual year 1 sales differ from expected year 1 sales. The 1.05 factor accounts for inflation. For example, if the year 1 sales figure is 180,000, which is 10 percentage points below the expected year 1 sales, then the year 2 price will be 1.05[25,000 + 50( 10)] = 25,725. Similarly, the year 3 price will be 1.05[year 2 price + 50(% diff2)] where % diff2 is the percentage by which actual year 2 sales differ from expected year 2 sales. The variable cost in year 1 is triangularly distributed with parameters 10,000, 12,000, and 15,000, and it is assumed to increase by 5% each year. Your goal is to estimate the NPV of the new car during its first three years. Assume that the company is able to produce exactly as many cars as it can sell. Also, assume that cash flows are discounted at 10%. Simulate 1000 trials to estimate the mean and standard deviation of the NPV for the first three years of sales. Also, determine an interval such that you are 95% certain that the NPV of the Racer during its first three years of operation will be within this interval.
Suppose you currently have a portfolio of three stocks, A, B, and C. You own 500 shares of A, 300 of B, and 1000 of C. The current share prices are 42.76, 81.33, and, 58.22, respectively. You plan to hold this portfolio for at least a year. During the coming year, economists have predicted that the national economy will be awful, stable, or great with probabilities 0.2, 0.5, and 0.3. Given the state of the economy, the returns (one-year percentage changes) of the three stocks are independent and normally distributed. However, the means and standard deviations of these returns depend on the state of the economy, as indicated in the file P11_23.xlsx. a. Use @RISK to simulate the value of the portfolio and the portfolio return in the next year. How likely is it that you will have a negative return? How likely is it that you will have a return of at least 25%? b. Suppose you had a crystal ball where you could predict the state of the economy with certainty. The stock returns would still be uncertain, but you would know whether your means and standard deviations come from row 6, 7, or 8 of the P11_23.xlsx file. If you learn, with certainty, that the economy is going to be great in the next year, run the appropriate simulation to answer the same questions as in part a. Repeat this if you learn that the economy is going to be awful. How do these results compare with those in part a?
W. L. Brown, a direct marketer of womens clothing, must determine how many telephone operators to schedule during each part of the day. W. L. Brown estimates that the number of phone calls received each hour of a typical eight-hour shift can be described by the probability distribution in the file P10_33.xlsx. Each operator can handle 15 calls per hour and costs the company 20 per hour. Each phone call that is not handled is assumed to cost the company 6 in lost profit. Considering the options of employing 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 operators, use simulation to determine the number of operators that minimizes the expected hourly cost (labor costs plus lost profits).
Seas Beginning sells clothing by mail order. An important question is when to strike a customer from the companys mailing list. At present, the company strikes a customer from its mailing list if a customer fails to order from six consecutive catalogs. The company wants to know whether striking a customer from its list after a customer fails to order from four consecutive catalogs results in a higher profit per customer. The following data are available: If a customer placed an order the last time she received a catalog, then there is a 20% chance she will order from the next catalog. If a customer last placed an order one catalog ago, there is a 16% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order two catalogs ago, there is a 12% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order three catalogs ago, there is an 8% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order four catalogs ago, there is a 4% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order five catalogs ago, there is a 2% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. It costs 2 to send a catalog, and the average profit per order is 30. Assume a customer has just placed an order. To maximize expected profit per customer, would Seas Beginning make more money canceling such a customer after six nonorders or four nonorders?
A common decision is whether a company should buy equipment and produce a product in house or outsource production to another company. If sales volume is high enough, then by producing in house, the savings on unit costs will cover the fixed cost of the equipment. Suppose a company must make such a decision for a four-year time horizon, given the following data. Use simulation to estimate the probability that producing in house is better than outsourcing. If the company outsources production, it will have to purchase the product from the manufacturer for 25 per unit. This unit cost will remain constant for the next four years. The company will sell the product for 42 per unit. This price will remain constant for the next four years. If the company produces the product in house, it must buy a 500,000 machine that is depreciated on a straight-line basis over four years, and its cost of production will be 9 per unit. This unit cost will remain constant for the next four years. The demand in year 1 has a worst case of 10,000 units, a most likely case of 14,000 units, and a best case of 16,000 units. The average annual growth in demand for years 2-4 has a worst case of 7%, a most likely case of 15%, and a best case of 20%. Whatever this annual growth is, it will be the same in each of the years. The tax rate is 35%. Cash flows are discounted at 8% per year.
If a monopolist produces q units, she can charge 400 4q dollars per unit. The variable cost is 60 per unit. a. How can the monopolist maximize her profit? b. If the monopolist must pay a sales tax of 5% of the selling price per unit, will she increase or decrease production (relative to the situation with no sales tax)? c. Continuing part b, use SolverTable to see how a change in the sales tax affects the optimal solution. Let the sales tax vary from 0% to 8% in increments of 0.5%.
In Example 11.1, the possible profits vary from negative to positive for each of the 10 possible bids examined. a. For each of these, use @RISKs RISKTARGET function to find the probability that Millers profit is positive. Do you believe these results should have any bearing on Millers choice of bid? b. Use @RISKs RISKPERCENTILE function to find the 10th percentile for each of these bids. Can you explain why the percentiles have the values you obtain?
Based on Babich (1992). Suppose that each week each of 300 families buys a gallon of orange juice from company A, B, or C. Let pA denote the probability that a gallon produced by company A is of unsatisfactory quality, and define pB and pC similarly for companies B and C. If the last gallon of juice purchased by a family is satisfactory, the next week they will purchase a gallon of juice from the same company. If the last gallon of juice purchased by a family is not satisfactory, the family will purchase a gallon from a competitor. Consider a week in which A families have purchased juice A, B families have purchased juice B, and C families have purchased juice C. Assume that families that switch brands during a period are allocated to the remaining brands in a manner that is proportional to the current market shares of the other brands. For example, if a customer switches from brand A, there is probability B/(B + C) that he will switch to brand B and probability C/(B + C) that he will switch to brand C. Suppose that the market is currently divided equally: 10,000 families for each of the three brands. a. After a year, what will the market share for each firm be? Assume pA = 0.10, pB = 0.15, and pC = 0.20. (Hint: You will need to use the RISKBINOMLAL function to see how many people switch from A and then use the RISKBENOMIAL function again to see how many switch from A to B and from A to C. However, if your model requires more RISKBINOMIAL functions than the number allowed in the academic version of @RISK, remember that you can instead use the BENOM.INV (or the old CRITBENOM) function to generate binomially distributed random numbers. This takes the form =BINOM.INV (ntrials, psuccess, RAND()).) b. Suppose a 1% increase in market share is worth 10,000 per week to company A. Company A believes that for a cost of 1 million per year it can cut the percentage of unsatisfactory juice cartons in half. Is this worthwhile? (Use the same values of pA, pB, and pC as in part a.)
You now have 10,000, all of which is invested in a sports team. Each year there is a 60% chance that the value of the team will increase by 60% and a 40% chance that the value of the team will decrease by 60%. Estimate the mean and median value of your investment after 50 years. Explain the large difference between the estimated mean and median.
Play Things is developing a new Lady Gaga doll. The company has made the following assumptions: The doll will sell for a random number of years from 1 to 10. Each of these 10 possibilities is equally likely. At the beginning of year 1, the potential market for the doll is two million. The potential market grows by an average of 4% per year. The company is 95% sure that the growth in the potential market during any year will be between 2.5% and 5.5%. It uses a normal distribution to model this. The company believes its share of the potential market during year 1 will be at worst 30%, most likely 50%, and at best 60%. It uses a triangular distribution to model this. The variable cost of producing a doll during year 1 has a triangular distribution with parameters 15, 17, and 20. The current selling price is 45. Each year, the variable cost of producing the doll will increase by an amount that is triangularly distributed with parameters 2.5%, 3%, and 3.5%. You can assume that once this change is generated, it will be the same for each year. You can also assume that the company will change its selling price by the same percentage each year. The fixed cost of developing the doll (which is incurred right away, at time 0) has a triangular distribution with parameters 5 million, 7.5 million, and 12 million. Right now there is one competitor in the market. During each year that begins with four or fewer competitors, there is a 25% chance that a new competitor will enter the market. Year t sales (for t 1) are determined as follows. Suppose that at the end of year t 1, n competitors are present (including Play Things). Then during year t, a fraction 0.9 0.1n of the company's loyal customers (last year's purchasers) will buy a doll from Play Things this year, and a fraction 0.2 0.04n of customers currently in the market ho did not purchase a doll last year will purchase a doll from Play Things this year. Adding these two provides the mean sales for this year. Then the actual sales this year is normally distributed with this mean and standard deviation equal to 7.5% of the mean. a. Use @RISK to estimate the expected NPV of this project. b. Use the percentiles in @ RISKs output to find an interval such that you are 95% certain that the companys actual NPV will be within this interval.
Based on Grossman and Hart (1983). A salesperson for Fuller Brush has three options: (1) quit, (2) put forth a low level of effort, or (3) put forth a high level of effort. Suppose for simplicity that each salesperson will sell 0, 5000, or 50,000 worth of brushes. The probability of each sales amount depends on the effort level as described in the file P07_71.xlsx. If a salesperson is paid w dollars, he or she regards this as a benefit of w1/2 units. In addition, low effort costs the salesperson 0 benefit units, whereas high effort costs 50 benefit units. If a salesperson were to quit Fuller and work elsewhere, he or she could earn a benefit of 20 units. Fuller wants all salespeople to put forth a high level of effort. The question is how to minimize the cost of encouraging them to do so. The company cannot observe the level of effort put forth by a salesperson, but it can observe the size of his or her sales. Thus, the wage paid to the salesperson is completely determined by the size of the sale. This means that Fuller must determine w0, the wage paid for sales of 0; w5000, the wage paid for sales of 5000; and w50,000, the wage paid for sales of 50,000. These wages must be set so that the salespeople value the expected benefit from high effort more than quitting and more than low effort. Determine how to minimize the expected cost of ensuring that all salespeople put forth high effort. (This problem is an example of agency theory.)

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