Although competitors can copy or match the goods and services a firm offers, the firm can still develop a sustainable competitive advantage through if its products have high perceived value and effective branding or positioning.

The hawthorne works was a large western electric factory with 45,000 employees. during the 1920s and 1930s, hawthorne works was the site of some well-known industrial studies. in one of the studies, researchers investigated the impact of different working conditions on worker productivity. prior to the start of the study, researchers secretly measured workers' productivity for several weeks. then researchers chose two workers, who then chose their own teams. the teams were separated from the general workforce and completed their work in different experiment rooms where the researchers could observe them more easily. over a 5-year period researchers manipulated the structure of the workday for each team (number and duration of breaks and number of hours per shift). for each of these changes in working conditions, the researchers measured the effect on productivity. for some conditions, such as frequent short breaks, workers rebelled by intentionally decreasing productivity.why did the researchers secretly measure the workers' productivity before creating the two treatment groups? a, to create similar treatment groups so that a cause-and-effect relationship could be establishedb, to draw conclusions about the productivity of all workers in the plant based on the test groupsc, to directly control for confounding variablesd, to provide a baseline for measuring worker productivity

Need with my trade theory homework. i doubt what i wrote was right.consider a monopolistically competitive market for soft drinks in which n symmetric firms face the following demand function: q=s(1/n-b(p-(p with the straight line on which implies the marginal revenue functionmr=p-(q/sb)finally, suppose firms face the total cost functiontc=900,000+100qsuppose the market size, s, is 27,000,000, and the elasticity parameter b is 0.003.diagram the price and the average total cost in the market as a function of the number of firms. what are the equations for each curve, and why does each curve slope up or down? label the equilibrium number of firms and the equilibrium price in the diagram. why is this the equilibrium?

Laurelton heating & cooling installs and services commercial heating and cooling systems. laurelton uses job costing to calculate the cost of its jobs. overhead is allocated to each job based on the number of direct labor hours spent on that job. at the beginning of the current year, laurelton estimated that its overhead for the coming year would be $ 61 comma 500. it also anticipated using 4 comma 100 direct labor hours for the year. in april comma laurelton started and completed the following two jobs: (click the icon to view the jobs.) laurelton paid a $ 20-per-hour wage rate to the employees who worked on these two jobs. read the requirements requirement 1. what is laurelton's predetermined overhead rate based on direct labor hours? determine the formula to calculate laurelton's predetermined overhead rate based on direct labor hours, then calculate the rate. / = predetermined overhead rate