Bianca is conducting an experiment to determine how temperatures affect the productivity of employees. she has just completed the first phase of her experiment, in which she had a group of employees perform job-related tasks in a special room where the temperature was 10 degrees cooler than on the factory floor. the employees in the experimental group consistently outperformed employees in the factory. the hawthorne effect suggests that the most likely reason for this improvement in performance is that the cooler working conditions allowed the employees in the experiment to work harder without getting tired.

Upscale hotels in the united states recently cut their prices by 20 percent in an effort to bolster dwindling occupancy rates among business travelers. a survey performed by a major research organization indicated that businesses are wary of current economic conditions and are now resorting to electronic media, such as the internet and the telephone, to transact business. assume a company's budget permits it to spend $5,000 per month on either business travel or electronic media to transact business. graphically illustrate how a 20 percent decline in the price of business travel would impact this company's budget set if the price of business travel was initially $1,000 per trip and the price of electronic media was $500 per hour. suppose that, after the price of business travel drops, the company issues a report indicating that its marginal rate of substitution between electronic media and business travel is 1. is the company allocating resources efficiently? explain.

Kumar consulting operates several stock investment portfolios that are used by firms for investment of pension plan assets. last year, one portfolio had a realized return of 12.6 percent and a beta coefficient of 1.15. the average t-bond rate was 7 percent and the realized rate of return on the s& p 500 was 12 percent. what was the portfolio's alpha?

In terms of the "great wheel of science", statistics are central to the research process (a) only between the hypothesis phase and the observation phase (b) only between the observation phase and the empirical generalization phase (c) only between the theory phase and the hypothesis phase (d) only between the empirical generalization phase and the theory phase