Part I The trend in home building in recent years has been to emphasize open spaces and great rooms, rather than smaller living rooms and family rooms. A builder of speculative homes in the college community of Oxford, Ohio, had been building such homes, but his homes had been taking many months to sell and had been selling for substantially less than the asking price. In order to determine what types of homes would attract residents of the community, the builder contacted a statistician at a local college.

Adrawback of short-term contracting as an alternative to making a component in-house is thata. it is the most-integrated alternative to performing an activity so the principal company has no control over the agent. b. the supplying firm has no incentive to make any transaction-specific investments to increase performance or quality. c. it fails to allow a long planning period that individual market transactions provide. d. the buying firm cannot demand lower prices due to the lack of a competitive bidding process.