In a market-directed system: o the government decides what products should be produced to meet the people's needs. o the emphasis lies in optimizing the rate of production. o customer satisfaction has very little importance. o firms do not rely on customer satisfaction as it is impossible to measure. o it is up to each customer to decide how effectively individual firms satisfy his or her needs.

Activity-based costing (abc) is not truly a cost collection mechanism as much as it is an inventory valuation method. the main purpose for implementing an activity-based cost system is to try to overcome some of the cost distortions that occur in traditional costing from product differences when there are variations in size and complexity. however, one of the disadvantages of utilizing abc is that the additional information gathering necessary to implement costing with that level of detail might be beyond the reach of some companies with resource or financial constraints. with this in mind, what kinds of industries or companies do you think would benefit most from using activity-based costing and why? in designing or modifying an accounting system to capture appropriate costs for abc, what considerations do you think would need to be made?