Your company supplies ceramic floor tiles to Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other home improvement stores. You have been asked to start using radio frequency identification tags on each case of tiles you ship to help your customers improve the management of your products and those of other suppliers in their warehouses. Use the Web to identify the cost of hardware, software, and networking components for an RFID system for your company. What factors should be considered? What are the key decisions that have to be made in determining whether your firm should adopt this technology?

Using the same amount of resources, the United States and Canada can both produce lumberjack shirts and lumberjack boots, as shown in the following production possibilities frontiers:

a. Who has a comparative advantage in producing lumberjack boots? Who has a comparative advantage in producing lumberjack shirts? Explain your reasoning.

b. Does either country have an absolute advantage in producing both goods? Explain.

c. Suppose that both countries are currently producing three pairs of boots and three shirts. Show that both can be better off if they each specialize in producing one good and then engage in trade.

Is the strong intrusion value of television an advantage? Why or why not?

Use the following information to work Problems

Bobbie’s Hair Care is a natural monopoly. Table shows the demand schedule (the first two columns) and Bobbie’s marginal cost schedule (the middle and third columns). Bobbie has done a survey and discovered that she has four types of customers each hour: one woman who is willing to pay $18, one senior who is willing to pay $16, one student who is willing to pay $14, and one boy who is willing to pay $12. Suppose that Bobbie’s fixed costs are $20 an hour and Bobbie’s price discriminates.

Who benefits from Bobbie’s price discrimination? Is the quantity of haircuts efficient?

(Residual dividend policy) FarmCo, Inc. follows a policy of paying out cash dividends equal to the residual amount that remains after funding 60 percent of its planned capital expenditures. The firm tries to maintain a 40 percent debt and 60 percent equity capital structure and does not plan on issuing more stock in the coming year. FarmCo’s CFO has estimated that the firm will earn $12 million in the current year.

a. If the firm maintains its target financing mix and does not issue any equity next year, what is the most it could spend on capital expenditures next year given its earnings estimate?

b. If FarmCo’s capital budget for next year is $10 million, how much will the firm pay in dividends and what is the resulting dividend payout percentage?

Which task is not typically performed by a network administrator?

a. developing network usage policies

b. installing networks

c. planning for disaster recovery

d. Web site programming

In primary succession, over time, biomass tends to (pick the correct term from the two) decrease/increase; species tend to be shorter-lived/longer-lived; and species diversity tends to decrease/increase.

Succession can be defined as a series of ____of community members at a given location until a relatively ____ is reached.

Succession at Mount St. Helens revealed the importance of biological legacies, meaning living things or products of living things that ____.

In the interaction known as ____, one species feeds on all or parts of a second organism; in the interaction known as ____, a predator feeds on prey but does not kill it immediately and may not ever kill it.