40 POINTS Improving customer relationships is an important marketing activity for all businesses. In what ways does MLB try to make sure they are meeting customer needs?

At the end of the week, carla receives her paycheck and goes directly to the bank after work to make a deposit into her savings account. the bank keeps the required reserve and then loans out the remaining balance to a qualified borrower named malik as a portion of his small business loan. malik uses the loan to buy a tractor for his construction business and makes small monthly payments to the bank to payback the principal balance plus interest on the loan. the bank profits from a portion of the interest payment received and also passes some of the interest back to carla in the form of an interest payment to her savings account. in this example, the bank is acting

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?

Qwest airlines has implemented a program to recycle all plastic drink cups used on their aircraft. their goal is to generate $7 million by the end of the recycle program's five-year life. each recycled cup can be sold for $0.005 (1/2 cent). a. how many cups must be recycled annually to meet this goal? assume uniform annual plastic cup usage and a 0% interest rate. b. repeat part (a) when the annual interest rate is 12%. c. why is the answer to part (b) less than the answer to part (a)?