answer

watching

views

22 Aug 2019

The chapter notes that global strategy can change over time for a firm. MTV is highlighted as one example in Exhibit 10.7. Conduct a web search of a firm you know to be operating internationally and determine its current global strategy position. How long has the firm stayed with this approach? Can you find evidence it had a different global strategy earlier?

answer

watching

264

views

For unlimited access to Homework Help, a Homework+ subscription is required.

You have 0 free answers left.
Get unlimited access to 3.8 million step-by-step answers.

Get unlimited access

Already have an account? Log in

Sixta KovacekLv2

24 Aug 2019

Unlock all answers

Get 1 free homework help answer.

Already have an account? Log in

Related questions

Question 1

Which compensation method helps to explain the large difference between the salaries of top-level managers and mid-level managers in a firm?

	A.	Tournaments
	B.	New blood
	C.	Piece rate
	D.	Backloaded compensation

3 points

Question 2

Please consider the information provided under Question 19 in Chapter 3 (page 54). Based on the stated information, the optimal number of bees kept if the externality is ignored by Yung is 5,000. Is the socially optimal number of bees higher or lower than 5,000?

	A.	We do not have enough information to answer this question
	B.	Same
	C.	Lower
	D.	Higher

3 points

Question 3

Which of the following factors contribute to the existence of firms?

	A.	All of these factors contribute to firm existence
	B.	Risks associated with specialization
	C.	Incomplete contracts
	D.	Willingness of some people to take on risk in exchange for residual income

3 points

Question 4

Public goods are often subject to free-rider problems because these goods are:

	A.	Non-rival and non-excludable
	B.	Rival and non-excludable
	C.	Non-rival and excludable
	D.	Rival and excludable

3 points

Question 5

Which of the following is the most efficient mechanism for allocating scarce goods?

	A.	Government allocation system
	B.	First-come-first-served system
	C.	Market system
	D.	Random allocation system

3 points

Question 6

Many years ago, most of the major Hollywood movie studios also owned chains of local movie theaters across the US. Today, most of the local movie theaters are owned by other companies. What has happened to the degree of integration in the movie industry over time?

	A.	Less horizontally integrated
	B.	Less vertically integrated
	C.	More horizontally integrated
	D.	More vertically integrated

3 points

Question 7

Your firm produces replacement parts for the nuclear submarines operated by the US Navy. Which one of Porter's Five Forces will be most prominent in determining your strategies and profitability?

	A.	Bargaining Power of Suppliers
	B.	Bargaining Power of Customers
	C.	Threat of New Entrants
	D.	Threat of Substitutes

3 points

Question 8

Which of the following statements is NOT true?

	A.	The market mechanism for allocating resources is most efficient due to the incentives it creates.
	B.	Markets are always the most efficient way to allocate goods, even if the market is not perfectly competitive.
	C.	The random allocation mechanism provides no incentives at all.
	D.	The government allocation mechanism provides no incentive for the economy to grow.

3 points

Question 9

Suppose a firm's cost structure exhibits economies of scope. Which of the following actions is compatible with this cost structure?

Diversify into other product lines

Focus on core competencies and reduce production

Focus on core competencies and maintain constant production

Focus on core competencies and expand production

Question 10

Please refer to Table 8.3 on page 132 in the book. Suppose we change the payoffs in the "low price, low price" cell to 0, 25 from 0, 0. Does this change the Nash equilibrium for the game, and is the game still a Prisoner's Dilemma?

	A.	Equilibrium changes, still a Prisoner's Dilemma
	B.	Equilibrium changes, no longer a Prisoner's Dilemma
	C.	Same equilibrium, no longer a Prisoner's Dilemma
	D.	Same equilibrium, still a Prisoner's Dilemma

3 points

Question 11

Which of the following statements about restricting entry to markets is NOT true?

	A.	Brand identity and logos are expensive to establish, and entrants may find it very expensive to establish comparable position in the market.
	B.	Predatory pricing is illegal but very difficult to prove in court
	C.	Branded products tend to have more elastic demand, which makes it more difficult for entrants to charge high prices and they must stay out of the market.
	D.	A low-quality seller cannot effectively use a warranty program to keep other firms out of its market

3 points

Question 12

Your firm earns $2 million per quarter in total revenue, and your accounting profits are $100,000 per quarter. You do not charge the firm for the use of an old building that you own because it is 50 years old and fully depreciated. However, another firm has offered you $200,000 per quarter to use the facility, and this is the market rental rate for similar facilities. In this case, we know that your:

	A.	Opportunity costs are positive and economic profits are negative
	B.	Opportunity costs and economic profits are positive
	C.	Opportunity costs are negative and economic profits are positive
	D.	Opportunity costs and economic profits are negative

3 points

Question 13

Please refer to Question 13 in Chapter 1 (page 17). What is the marginal cost of reducing global warming by 0.017 degrees?

	A.	MC = 60
	B.	MC = 5
	C.	We do not have enough information to answer this question
	D.	MC = 50

3 points

Question 14

In Chapter 6, Boyes focuses on negative externalities such as the various types of pollution. However, as we discussed during our online session, we can also observe positive externalities in which external benefits are generated for people. Which of the following is NOT an example of a positive externality?

	A.	Workers can help one another to "cover the phones" and make sure that someone is always available to help clients
	B.	Workers can provide ideas to one another about how to solve problems
	C.	All of these cases are examples of positive externalities
	D.	Workers can form carpools and use other means to reduce commuting costs

3 points

Question 15

Common property resources are:

	A.	Non-rival and non-excludable
	B.	Non-rival and excludable
	C.	Rival and non-excludable
	D.	Rival and excludable

3 points

Question 16

The free-rider problem arises in markets for common property resources.

	A.	False
	B.	True

3 points

Question 17

Firms that set their product price below the actual cost of production may be engaging in:

	A.	Predatory pricing
	B.	Monopoly pricing
	C.	Moral hazard
	D.	Dollar-cost averaging

3 points

Question 18

Under a cap-and-trade mechanism to control air pollution, what happens to the price of pollution rights if the supply of righs is reduced (i.e., the supply of rights is reduced)?

Increases

Decreases

No change

Question 19

The key method for a manufacturing firm to avoid hold-up problems is to have another source of inputs.

	A.	False
	B.	True

3 points

Question 20

Your firm sells luxury autos, and you have asked the marketing department to develop and stronger brand identity through a new ad campaign. After the campaign has run for 6 months, you hire an economic consultant to study the impact of the campaign on the demand for your autos. The consultant reports that the demand for your cars is now more elastic than it was 6 months ago. Was the new ad campaign successful?

	A.	Yes
	B.	No

Lonely Planet In 1972, Tony and Maureen Wheeler were newlyweds who decided to have one last adventurous travel experience before settling down. Their trip was an overland trek from London to Australia through Asia. So many other travelers asked them about their experiences that they sat down at their kitchen table and wrote a book titled Across Asia on the Cheap. They published the book themselves and were surprised by how many copies they sold.

More than three decades and 60 million books later, their publishing enterprise has turned out to be one of the most successful in history. The Wheelers%u2019 publishing company, Lonely Planet, has grown rapidly, with typical annual sales increases of 15 percent or more. In 2007, BBC Worldwide purchased a 75 percent ownership interest in the company and purchased the rest of the company%u2019s stock in 2011.

Lonely Planet TV now produces a variety of travel and documentary programs that appear on cable networks throughout the world. As a BBC subsidiary, the company does not release sales figures, but industry analysts estimate current annual revenues to be about $110 million. Lonely Planet publishes more than 600 titles and holds a 20 percent share of the travel guide market. The company has more than 450 employees in its U.K., U.S., French, and Australian offices performing editorial, production, graphic design, and marketing tasks.

Travel guide content is written by a network of more than 200 contract authors in more than 20 countries. These authors are knowledgeable about everything from visa regulations to hotel prices to the names of the hottest new entertainment spots. The combined expertise of the in-house staff and the in- country authors has kept Lonely Planet ahead of its competitors for many years.

Lonely Planet also offers travel services that include a phone card, hotel and hostel room- booking, airplane tickets, European rail travel reservations and tickets, package tours, and travel insurance. These services are sold by telephone and on the Lonely Planet Web site. The Web site has won numerous awards, including the Society of American Travel Writers Silver Award and a spot on Time magazine%u2019s %u201CFifty Best Web Sites%u201D list.

The site was launched in 1994 and includes an online store in which Lonely Planet publications are sold. However, the site%u2019s main draws are its comprehensive collection of information about travel destinations and its online discussion area, the Thorn Tree, which has nearly a half million registered users. The company has had trouble turning any of this information into a source of revenue generation. Despite its excellent Web site and its use of new technologies, most of Lonely Planet%u2019s revenues are still generated by book sales.

The typical production cycle of a travel guide is about eight months long. This is the time it takes to commission authors, conduct research, work through several drafts of writing and editing, select photos, create the physical book, and print it. This production cycle causes new books to be almost a year out of date by the time they are published. Only the most popular titles are revised annually. Other titles are on two-, three-, or four-year revision cycles. The time delay in publication means that many details in the guides are outdated or wrong; restaurants and hotels close (or move), exchange rates and visa regulations change, and once hot night spots are abandoned by fickle clientele. Lonely Planet publications are well researched and of high quality, but the writers do not work continually because the books are not published continually.

The Web site often has information that is more current than the published travel guides. The site%u2019s online shop does offer some custom guides, which are parts of its existing travel guides packaged in different ways, and it does let customers buy specific chapters from its books, but it still is largely focused on selling books, although the site does offer PDF files that can be downloaded to mobile devices. Lonely Planet has adopted some new technologies, but has not used them to change its revenue model in any major way or to make basic changes in the production of its main product, the travel guides.

Required: 1. Review the company%u2019s offerings for Apple iPhone and iPad products and for Android smart phones (Trippy). Evaluate those products and identify opportunities for other products or services that the company could offer for mobile devices that would take advantage of Internet technologies (including wireless technologies for mobile devices) and address customers%u2019 concerns about the timeliness and currency of information in the printed travel guides.

2. Prepare a report in which you analyze the marketing channel conflicts and cannibalization issues that Lonely Planet faces as it is currently operating. Suggest solutions that might reduce the revenue losses or operational frictions that result from these issues.

carminerhinoceros643

Learn more about Social Security and Medicare reform (to improve financial strength of the programs) or solvency through Internet exploration. Find an article or resource related to one of these topics. Attach the article and write a brief summary (300-400 words) of what you found. Summarize the Article.

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

U.S. Social Security reform: the clock is ticking

Clocks are seen during the performance "tck tck tck" by Global Campaign for Climate Action at the Barcelona Climate Change Talks, November 4, 2009. REUTERS/Albert Gea

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Can you count on your Social Security benefits when retirement rolls around?

Most Americans worry about this - partly due to the nonsense they hear from political opponents of Social Security and ill-informed media. You will hear that the program is bankrupt, its reserves are nothing but a bunch of IOUs, or that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

All of those claims are false, but there is one good reason for concern. Social Security faces a long-term financial imbalance that would force sharp benefit cuts in 2034 unless the government makes changes. The problem stems from falling fertility rates and labor force growth - which reduces collection of payroll taxes that fund the system - and also from the retirement of baby boomers, which increases benefit costs.

Absent reform, Social Security could continue to pay roughly 75 percent of promised benefits. The cuts would mean that the typical 65-year-old worker could expect Social Security to replace 27 percent of pre-retirement income, down from 36 percent today, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

No surprise, then, that only 37 percent of workers are âvery or somewhat confidentâ that Social Security will be able to maintain current benefit levels in the future, according to survey research by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) - although confidence is much higher among older workers and retirees.

From a math standpoint, potential solutions to the problem are straightforward. The cuts can be avoided through increased revenue, benefit reductions or some combination of the two. But the politics are another matter.

Republicans are far from holding a unified position on the issue. For example, U.S. Representative Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, has proposed legislation containing two significant benefit cuts: gradually raising full retirement ages to 69 by 2030, and using a less generous annual cost-of-living adjustment formula known as the chained CPI.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has so far held to his campaign promise of opposing cuts. He has suggested that economic growth will solve the problem by stimulating wage growth and payroll tax collections - a position most economists dismiss as unrealistic.

REPUBLICAN ENTHUSIASM LACKING

The last major Republican reform proposal dates back to the George W. Bush administration, which proposed shifting the program to personal savings accounts - an idea that aroused Republican passion but that went down in flames.

âThat was an idea that got people excited, but there hasnât been much enthusiasm for Social Security reform among Republicans since then,â said Andrew Biggs, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Biggs worked on Social Security reform as an associate director of the White House National Economic Council.

Meanwhile, Democrats are in no mood to work with the Trump administration on anything that forces a compromise on their core values - and they have shifted significantly to the left on Social Security reform. Representative John Larson has introduced legislation that would not only restore trust fund balance but expand benefits. That is by far the best approach, since roughly half of all households have saved less than $25,000, according to EBRI. Larsonâs bill is cosponsored by more than 80 percent of the Democratic House caucus - more than any previous expansion bill.

The bill would increase benefits by 2 percent across the board, shift to a more generous annual cost-of-living adjustment that reflects spending by seniors and set a new minimum benefit at 25 percent above the poverty line. It also would cut taxes for millions of retirees by boosting significantly the threshold for taxation of benefits.

The plan raises revenue by gradually increasing the payroll tax rates that fund the program. The rate hikes would begin in 2019, and by 2042, workers and employers would pay 7.4 percent each, instead of the current 6.2 percent.

Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, also proposes changes to the payroll tax cap for very wealthy beneficiaries. Currently, payroll tax is collected only on wages up to $127,200; the plan would start collecting taxes again on wages above $400,000. That exempts more income than many earlier expansion plans, which either removed the cap entirely or resumed taxation at $250,000.

The payroll tax cap feature played an important role in boosting support for expansion legislation, according to Max Richtman, CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a progressive advocacy group that supports the bill. âIt brought many of the more conservative Democratic legislators on board,â he said.

Of course, the Larson bill is going nowhere in the Republican-controlled Congress, so Social Security reform will not happen before the 2018 midterm elections at the earliest - and perhaps much later than that. But that does not mean beneficiaries should worry about draconian cuts in 2034.

Even if reform is not achieved by 2034, Biggs thinks the problem likely would be solved at the 11th hour through tax increases - simply because benefit cuts must be enacted and phased in over long periods to give beneficiaries time to adjust.

âIf they were going to do this by cutting benefits, it should have been enacted 20 years ago,â he said. âIf you want to do it by raising taxes you want to wait as long as possible, so that you get to the point where the only solution is to put more money into the program.â

But the uncertainty on Social Security policy will continue to undermine public confidence in the program - and that is worrying. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.