Magdeleine James is a sole trader, who sells souvenir T-shirts. She wishes to sell her T-shirts at the Tobago Jazz festival. Each t-shirt cost $165 to produce and sells for $225. After the festival, she reduces the sale price of the T-shirts by 70% in order to sell them off. Experience from previous years has shown that the demand for these T-shirts at the festival is 82, with a standard deviation of 21. How many T-shirts should Magdeleine take to sell at the festival?

Magdeleine James is a sole trader, who sells souvenir T-shirts. She wishes to sell her T-shirts at the Tobago Jazz festival. Each t-shirt cost $165 to produce and sells for $225. After the festival, she reduces the sale price of the T-shirts by 70% in order to sell them off. Experience from previous years has shown that the demand for these T-shirts at the festival is 82, with a standard deviation of 21. How many T-shirts should Magdeleine take to sell at the festival?

Practical Management Science

6th Edition

ISBN:9781337406659

Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Publisher:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Chapter2: Introduction To Spreadsheet Modeling

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 40P

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Dilberts Department Store is trying to determine how many Hanson T-shirts to order. Currently the shirts are sold for 21, but at later dates the shirts will be offered at a 10% discount, then a 20% discount, then a 40% discount, then a 50% discount, and finally a 60% discount. Demand at the full price of 21 is believed to be normally distributed with mean 1800 and standard deviation 360. Demand at various discounts is assumed to be a multiple of full-price demand. These multiples, for discounts of 10%, 20%, 40%, 50%, and 60% are, respectively, 0.4, 0.7, 1.1, 2, and 50. For example, if full-price demand is 2500, then at a 10% discount customers would be willing to buy 1000 T-shirts. The unit cost of purchasing T-shirts depends on the number of T-shirts ordered, as shown in the file P10_36.xlsx. Use simulation to determine how many T-shirts the company should order. Model the problem so that the company first orders some quantity of T-shirts, then discounts deeper and deeper, as necessary, to sell all of the shirts.
Assume the demand for a companys drug Wozac during the current year is 50,000, and assume demand will grow at 5% a year. If the company builds a plant that can produce x units of Wozac per year, it will cost 16x. Each unit of Wozac is sold for 3. Each unit of Wozac produced incurs a variable production cost of 0.20. It costs 0.40 per year to operate a unit of capacity. Determine how large a Wozac plant the company should build to maximize its expected profit over the next 10 years.
Lemingtons is trying to determine how many Jean Hudson dresses to order for the spring season. Demand for the dresses is assumed to follow a normal distribution with mean 400 and standard deviation 100. The contract between Jean Hudson and Lemingtons works as follows. At the beginning of the season, Lemingtons reserves x units of capacity. Lemingtons must take delivery for at least 0.8x dresses and can, if desired, take delivery on up to x dresses. Each dress sells for 160 and Hudson charges 50 per dress. If Lemingtons does not take delivery on all x dresses, it owes Hudson a 5 penalty for each unit of reserved capacity that is unused. For example, if Lemingtons orders 450 dresses and demand is for 400 dresses, Lemingtons will receive 400 dresses and owe Jean 400(50) + 50(5). How many units of capacity should Lemingtons reserve to maximize its expected profit?
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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.
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