he treasury manager of a chain of clothing stores wants to develop a medium-term forecast. Management plans to open two new stores, and anticipates same-store sales to increase by 15%. Which of the following items can be predicted with the highest degree of certainty? Group of answer choices Taxes on the exercise of stock options fixed bond interest payments new product sales new franchise fees

he treasury manager of a chain of clothing stores wants to develop a medium-term forecast. Management plans to open two new stores, and anticipates same-store sales to increase by 15%. Which of the following items can be predicted with the highest degree of certainty? Group of answer choices Taxes on the exercise of stock options fixed bond interest payments new product sales new franchise fees

Practical Management Science

6th Edition

ISBN:9781337406659

Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Publisher:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Chapter13: Regression And Forecasting Models

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 34P: A small computer chip manufacturer wants to forecast monthly ozperating costs as a function of the...

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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.
The Baker Company wants to develop a budget to predict how overhead costs vary with activity levels. Management is trying to decide whether direct labor hours (DLH) or units produced is the better measure of activity for the firm. Monthly data for the preceding 24 months appear in the file P13_40.xlsx. Use regression analysis to determine which measure, DLH or Units (or both), should be used for the budget. How would the regression equation be used to obtain the budget for the firms overhead costs?
The owner of a restaurant in Bloomington, Indiana, has recorded sales data for the past 19 years. He has also recorded data on potentially relevant variables. The data are listed in the file P13_17.xlsx. a. Estimate a simple regression equation involving annual sales (the dependent variable) and the size of the population residing within 10 miles of the restaurant (the explanatory variable). Interpret R-square for this regression. b. Add another explanatory variableannual advertising expendituresto the regression equation in part a. Estimate and interpret this expanded equation. How does the R-square value for this multiple regression equation compare to that of the simple regression equation estimated in part a? Explain any difference between the two R-square values. How can you use the adjusted R-squares for a comparison of the two equations? c. Add one more explanatory variable to the multiple regression equation estimated in part b. In particular, estimate and interpret the coefficients of a multiple regression equation that includes the previous years advertising expenditure. How does the inclusion of this third explanatory variable affect the R-square, compared to the corresponding values for the equation of part b? Explain any changes in this value. What does the adjusted R-square for the new equation tell you?
The file P13_02.xlsx contains five years of monthly data on sales (number of units sold) for a particular company. The company suspects that except for random noise, its sales are growing by a constant percentage each month and will continue to do so for at least the near future. a. Explain briefly whether the plot of the series visually supports the companys suspicion. b. By what percentage are sales increasing each month? c. What is the MAPE for the forecast model in part b? In words, what does it measure? Considering its magnitude, does the model seem to be doing a good job? d. In words, how does the model make forecasts for future months? Specifically, given the forecast value for the last month in the data set, what simple arithmetic could you use to obtain forecasts for the next few months?
Suppose that a regional express delivery service company wants to estimate the cost of shipping a package (Y) as a function of cargo type, where cargo type includes the following possibilities: fragile, semifragile, and durable. Costs for 15 randomly chosen packages of approximately the same weight and same distance shipped, but of different cargo types, are provided in the file P13_16.xlsx. a. Estimate a regression equation using the given sample data, and interpret the estimated regression coefficients. b. According to the estimated regression equation, which cargo type is the most costly to ship? Which cargo type is the least costly to ship? c. How well does the estimated equation fit the given sample data? How might the fit be improved? d. Given the estimated regression equation, predict the cost of shipping a package with semifragile cargo.
The file P13_22.xlsx contains total monthly U.S. retail sales data. While holding out the final six months of observations for validation purposes, use the method of moving averages with a carefully chosen span to forecast U.S. retail sales in the next year. Comment on the performance of your model. What makes this time series more challenging to forecast?
A small computer chip manufacturer wants to forecast monthly ozperating costs as a function of the number of units produced during a month. The company has collected the 16 months of data in the file P13_34.xlsx. a. Determine an equation that can be used to predict monthly production costs from units produced. Are there any outliers? b. How could the regression line obtained in part a be used to determine whether the company was efficient or inefficient during any particular month?
If the weights for a moving average forecast with a span of 4 are: 0.4,0.2,0.3,0.1 Problem: Under prediction Problem: Over prediction No problem
Sales of a particular product (in the thousands of dollars) for the year of 2015 through 2018 have been $48,000, $64,000, $67,000 and $83,000 respectively. (a) What sales would you predict for 2019, using a simple four year moving average? (b) What sales would you predict for 2019, using a weighted moving average with weights of 0.50 for the immediate preceding year 0.3, 0.15, and 0.05 for the three years before that?
As you can see in the following table, demand for heart transplant surgery at Washington General Hospital has increased steadily in the past few years: Year 1 2 3 4 5 Heart Transplants 48.0 50.0 52.0 57.0 58.0 The director of medical services predicted 6 years ago that demand in year 1 would be 44.0 surgeries. a) Using exponential smoothing with α of 0.60 and the given forecast for year 1, the forecasts for years 2 through 6 are (round your responses to one decimal place): Year 1 2 3 4 5 6 Forecast 44.0 nothing nothing nothing
Sales over the past 10 years are shown below. Using the method of least squares, calculate the values of a and b to complete this regression equation. Year Sales 1 1,640 2 1,850 3 1,240 4 1,250 5 1,980 6 1,400 7 1,060 8 1,430 9 1,050 10 1,990 (Indicate a negative answer using a "-" sign. Do not round intermediate calculations and round your answer to 3 decimal places.) What is your forecast for next year's sales? (Do not round intermediate calculations and round your answer to 2 decimal places.)
Discuss what are the benefits as a prediction tool over the moving average of exponential smoothing?