McDonald's culture, with an emphasis on cleanliness, consistency, service, and the training that reinforces the value of these characteristics, illustrates which of the following criteria for sustainable competitive advantage?
A) Valuable
B) Rare
C) Costly to imitate
D) Nonsubstitutable

Consider the local telephone company, a natural monopoly. the following graph shows the monthly demand curve for phone services and the company’s marginal revenue (mr), marginal cost (mc), and average total cost (atc) curves. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 price (dollars per subscription) quantity (thousands of subscriptions) d mr mc atc 8, 60 suppose that the government has decided not to regulate this industry, and the firm is free to maximize profits, without constraints. complete the first row of the following table. pricing mechanism short run long-run decision quantity price profit (subscriptions) (dollars per subscription) profit maximization marginal-cost pricing average-cost pricing suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to marginal cost. complete the second row of the previous table. suppose that the government forces the monopolist to set the price equal to average total cost. complete the third row of the previous table. under average-cost pricing, the government will raise the price of output whenever a firm’s costs increase, and lower the price whenever a firm’s costs decrease. over time, under the average-cost pricing policy, what will the local telephone company most likely do

Your parents have accumulated a $170,000 nest egg. they have been planning to use this money to pay college costs to be incurred by you and your sister, courtney. however, courtney has decided to forgo college and start a nail salon. your parents are giving courtney $20,000 to her get started, and they have decided to take year-end vacations costing $8,000 per year for the next four years. use 8 percent as the appropriate interest rate throughout this problem. use appendix a and appendix d for an approximate answer, but calculate your final answer using the formula and financial calculator methods. a. how much money will your parents have at the end of four years to you with graduate school, which you will start then?

When used-car dealers signal the quality of a used car with a warranty, a. buyers believe the signal because the cost of a false signal is high b. it is not rational to believe the signal because some used-car dealers are crooked c. the demand for lemons is eliminated d. the price of a lemon rises above the price of a good used car because warranty costs on lemons are greater than warranty costs on good used cars