Teaching note for product 9B17B021.

In 2016, the owner of a cow-calf operation must decide what the appropriate weight for cows in their herd is. For decades, the national trend has been for cow weights to increase because they produce larger calves, but evidence indicates that cow weights may have reached the point where the cost of maintaining a larger cow has become greater than the return from producing a larger calf. Analyzing this issue introduces marginal principles from economics. .....more

The owner of a goat herd had successfully rented a portion of his herd to clear land at a nearby resort. The resort land clearing job generated a small profit and now the owner is evaluating the prospects of bidding on similar land clearing projects in the area. The owner believes that profitability for this line of business is constrained by the size of the truck and trailer used to transport the goats to the job site. He reasons that a larger truck .....more

The owner of a goat herd must decide whether to rent the herd for a land-clearing project at a nearby resort. Goats are better suited to clearing the land than humans and machines would be, but the owner has never rented the goats for such a purpose. The owner must identify costs associated with the project, then must determine a price to charge for the service. Since the owner has no prior experience renting livestock, he must come up with estimates .....more

This case concerns an executive who must estimate the demand for Kodak Express outlets in various developing countries based on socioeconomic and demographic data about the countries. The case requires students to think about how to transform data on a national scale (GDP per capita, population, income distribution) into a form that is meaningful for a managerial decision -- the number of outlets that could be supported by a country's market demographics. .....more

In June 1997, the Bank of Thailand must decide whether to continue or to abandon the peg of the baht to the U.S dollar. Recent economic performance in Thailand has caused speculation that the central bank will abandon the currency peg, but the bank's stated policy for many years has been that it will maintain the peg. Background about the Thai economy is presented in the core case, product 9B01M025. Other cases enable students to play roles .....more

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently approved a drug-coated stent for use in angioplasty procedures. The stent is expected to reduce the rate of repeat procedures due to restenosis, and to postpone the need for more invasive surgery such as coronary bypass. However, the drug-coated stent costs three times as much as an uncoated stent, which will increase the cost of the medical procedure. Public demand for the stent is overwhelming, .....more

Teaching note for product 9B05M053.

A junior executive is given the task of calculating a benchmark common in the ship building industry - cost per compensated gross ton. Although raw data is available for its components, the executive must formulate relationships between the data to determine the benchmark. The case is designed to provide: 1) an introduction to the construction and use of benchmarks in quality management; 2) practice in conceptualizing a problem and designing a basic .....more

Teaching note for product 9B04D019.