A manufacturing firm spends $350,000 annually for a required safety inspection program. A new monitoring technology would eliminate the need for such inspection. If the interest rate is 8% per year, how much can the firm afford to spend on this new technology? The firm wants to recover its investment in 20 years. Contributed by Hamed Kashani, Saeid Sadri, Baabak Ashuri, Georgia Institute of Technology

Your project team’s recommendations to increase productivity have been approved and your team is now working on an implementation plan. in order to accomplish the plan, several subject matter experts from various parts of the organization have been brought in to assist. you have noticed friction and conflict among team members. some of the disagreement and opposition on your team supports the achievement of team goals and objectives. this type of conflict can be described as:

Ajustification for job training programs is that they improve worker productivity. suppose that you are asked to evaluate whether more job training makes workers more productive. however, rather than having data on individual workers, you have access to data on manufacturing firms in ohio. in particu- lar, for each firm, you have information on hours of job training per worker (training) and number of nondefective items produced per worker hour (output). (i) carefully state the ceteris paribus thought experiment underlying this policy question. (ii) does it seem likely that a firm’s decision to train its workers will be independent of worker characteristics? what are some of those measurable and unmeasurable worker characteristics? (iii) name a factor other than worker characteristics that can affect worker productivity. (iv) if you find a positive correlation between output and training, would you have convincingly established that job training makes workers more productive? explain.

As sales exceed the break‑even point, a high contribution‑margin percentage (a) increases profits faster than does a low contribution-margin percentage (b) increases profits at the same rate as a low contribution-margin percentage (c) decreases profits at the same rate as a low contribution-margin percentage (d) increases profits slower than does a low contribution-margin percentage