On august 1, 1958, first-class postage for a 1-ounce envelope was 4 cents. on august 1, 2007, a first-class stamp for the same envelope cost 41 cents. what was the annual compound increase in the cost of first-class postage during the 49-year period?

Beta coefficients and the capital asset pricing model personal finance problem katherine wilson is wondering how much risk she must undertake to generate an acceptable return on her porfolio. the risk-free return currently is 4%. the return on the overall stock market is 14%. use the capm to calculate how high the beta coefficient of katherine's portfolio would have to be to achieve a portfolio return of 16%.

Kando company incurs a $9 per unit cost for product a, which it currently manufactures and sells for $13.50 per unit. instead of manufacturing and selling this product, the company can purchase product b for $5 per unit and sell it for $12 per unit. if it does so, unit sales would remain unchanged and $5 of the $9 per unit costs assigned to product a would be eliminated. 1. prepare incremental cost analysis. should the company continue to manufacture product a or purchase product b for resale? (round your answers to 2 decimal places.)

Aproduction line has three machines a, b, and c, with reliabilities of .96, .86, and .85, respectively. the machines are arranged so that if one breaks down, the others must shut down. engineers are weighing two alternative designs for increasing the line’s reliability. plan 1 involves adding an identical backup line, and plan 2 involves providing a backup for each machine. in either case, three machines (a, b, and c) would be used with reliabilities equal to the original three. a. compute overall system reliability under plan 1. (round your intermediate calculations and final answer to 4 decimal places.) reliability b. compute overall system reliability under plan 2. (round your intermediate calculations and final answer to 4 decimal places.) reliability c. which plan will provide the higher reliability? plan2plan1