Alex wilson and james lawrence are discussing the high price of crude oil in the global market. alex, a sociology professor who follows the financial markets closely, claims that the volume of trade in oil futures has increased indicating that speculators are responsible for the high oil prices. james, who works at an investment bank, thinks that the increase in oil prices is demand-driven. according to him, the higher price of oil reflects growing demand from developing countries.

Reqwest llc agrees to sell one hundred servers to social media networks, inc. the servers, which social media networks expressly requires to have certain amounts of memory, are to be shipped “f.o.b. social media networks distribution center in tampa, fl.” when the servers arrive, social media networks rejects them and informs reqwest, claiming that the servers do not conform to social media networks’ memory requirement. a few hours later, the servers are destroyed in a fire at social media networks’ distribution center. will reqwest succeed in a suit against social media networks for the cost of the goods?

Suppose that two firms produce differentiated products and compete in prices. as in class, the two firms are located at two ends of a line one mile apart. consumers are evenly distributed along the line. the firms have identical marginal cost, $60. firm b produces a product with value $110 to consumers.firm a (located at 0 on the unit line) produces a higher quality product with value $120 to consumers. the cost of travel are directly related to the distance a consumer travels to purchase a good. if a consumerhas to travel a mile to purchase a good, the incur a cost of $20. if they have to travel x fraction of a mile, they incur a cost of $20x. (a) write down the expressions for how much a consumer at location d would value the products sold by firms a and b, if they set prices p_{a} and p_{b} ? (b) based on your expressions in (a), how much will be demanded from each firm if prices p_{a} and p_{b} are set? (c) what are the nash equilibrium prices?

Serious question, which is preferred in a business? pp or poopoo?