Concept explainers
a)
To determine: The equation that would fit the data.
Introduction:
b)
To interpret: The best-fitting equation.
Introduction: Forecasting is a technique of predicting future events based on historical data and projecting them into the future with a mathematical model. Forecasting may be an intuitive or subjective prediction.
c)
To predict: The sales when the price is $470.
Introduction: Forecasting is a technique of predicting future events based on historical data and projecting them into the future with a mathematical model. Forecasting may be an intuitive or subjective prediction.
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Practical Management Science
- A company manufacturers a product in the United States and sells it in England. The unit cost of manufacturing is 50. The current exchange rate (dollars per pound) is 1.221. The demand function, which indicates how many units the company can sell in England as a function of price (in pounds) is of the power type, with constant 27556759 and exponent 2.4. a. Develop a model for the companys profit (in dollars) as a function of the price it charges (in pounds). Then use a data table to find the profit-maximizing price to the nearest pound. b. If the exchange rate varies from its current value, does the profit-maximizing price increase or decrease? Does the maximum profit increase or decrease?arrow_forwardSuppose you have invested 25% of your portfolio in four different stocks. The mean and standard deviation of the annual return on each stock are shown in the file P11_46.xlsx. The correlations between the annual returns on the four stocks are also shown in this file. a. What is the probability that your portfolios annual return will exceed 30%? b. What is the probability that your portfolio will lose money during the year?arrow_forwardThe file P13_04.xlsx lists the monthly sales for a company (in millions of dollars) for a 10-year period. a. Fit an exponential trend line to these data. b. By what percentage do you estimate that the company will grow each month? c. Why cant a high rate of exponential growth continue for a long time? d. Rather than an exponential curve, what type of curve might better represent the growth of a new technology?arrow_forward
- 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.arrow_forwardThe file P13_21.xlsx contains the weekly sales of rakes at a hardware store for a two-year period. Use the moving averages method, with spans of your choice, to forecast sales for the next 30 weeks. Does this method appear to track sales well? If not, what might be the reason?arrow_forwardContinuing the previous problem, assume, as in Problem 11, that the damage amount is normally distributed with mean 3000 and standard deviation 750. Run @RISK with 5000 iterations to simulate the amount you pay for damage. Compare your results with those in the previous problem. Does it appear to matter whether you assume a triangular distribution or a normal distribution for damage amounts? Why isnt this a totally fair comparison? (Hint: Use @RISKs Define Distributions tool to find the standard deviation for the triangular distribution.)arrow_forward
- Sometimes curvature in a scatterplot can be fit adequately (especially to the naked eye) by several trend lines. We discussed the exponential trend line, and the power trend line is discussed in the previous problem. Still another fairly simple trend line is the parabola, a polynomial of order 2 (also called a quadratic). For the demand-price data in the file P13_10.xlsx, fit all three of these types of trend lines to the data, and calculate the MAPE for each. Which provides the best fit? (Hint: Note that a polynomial of order 2 is still another of Excels Trend line options.)arrow_forwardYou want to take out a 450,000 loan on a 20-year mortgage with end-of-month payments. The annual rate of interest is 3%. Twenty years from now, you will need to make a 50,000 ending balloon payment. Because you expect your income to increase, you want to structure the loan so at the beginning of each year, your monthly payments increase by 2%. a. Determine the amount of each years monthly payment. You should use a lookup table to look up each years monthly payment and to look up the year based on the month (e.g., month 13 is year 2, etc.). b. Suppose payment each month is to be the same, and there is no balloon payment. Show that the monthly payment you can calculate from your spreadsheet matches the value given by the Excel PMT function PMT(0.03/12,240, 450000,0,0).arrow_forwardYou are considering a 10-year investment project. At present, the expected cash flow each year is 10,000. Suppose, however, that each years cash flow is normally distributed with mean equal to last years actual cash flow and standard deviation 1000. For example, suppose that the actual cash flow in year 1 is 12,000. Then year 2 cash flow is normal with mean 12,000 and standard deviation 1000. Also, at the end of year 1, your best guess is that each later years expected cash flow will be 12,000. a. Estimate the mean and standard deviation of the NPV of this project. Assume that cash flows are discounted at a rate of 10% per year. b. Now assume that the project has an abandonment option. At the end of each year you can abandon the project for the value given in the file P11_60.xlsx. For example, suppose that year 1 cash flow is 4000. Then at the end of year 1, you expect cash flow for each remaining year to be 4000. This has an NPV of less than 62,000, so you should abandon the project and collect 62,000 at the end of year 1. Estimate the mean and standard deviation of the project with the abandonment option. How much would you pay for the abandonment option? (Hint: You can abandon a project at most once. So in year 5, for example, you abandon only if the sum of future expected NPVs is less than the year 5 abandonment value and the project has not yet been abandoned. Also, once you abandon the project, the actual cash flows for future years are zero. So in this case the future cash flows after abandonment should be zero in your model.)arrow_forward
- Stock market analysts are continually looking for reliable predictors of stock prices. Consider the problem of modeling the price per share of electric utility stocks (Y). Two variables thought to influence this stock price are return on average equity (X1) and annual dividend rate (X2). The stock price, returns on equity, and dividend rates on a randomly selected day for 16 electric utility stocks are provided in the file P13_15.xlsx. Estimate a multiple regression equation using the given data. Interpret each of the estimated regression coefficients. Also, interpret the standard error of estimate and the R-square value for these data.arrow_forwardSuppose 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.arrow_forwardWhen you use @RISKs correlation feature to generate correlated random numbers, how can you verify that they are correlated? Try the following. Use the RISKCORRMAT function to generate two normally distributed random numbers, each with mean 100 and standard deviation 10, and with correlation 0.7. To run a simulation, you need an output variable, so sum these two numbers and designate the sum as an output variable. Run the simulation with 1000 iterations and then click the Browse Results button to view the histogram of the output or either of the inputs. Then click the Scatterplot button below the histogram and choose another variable (an input or the output) for the scatterplot. Using this method, are the two inputs correlated as expected? Are the two inputs correlated with the output? If so, how?arrow_forward
- Practical Management ScienceOperations ManagementISBN:9781337406659Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.Publisher:Cengage,