Every year, in the weeks surrounding certain holidays, USPS stations all over the country have a surge in parcels, which contain a lot of eventually useless gifts. USPS collects and maintains data about the number of truckloads of mail they had to deliver during these weeks. The data below demand distribution for the number of trucks that have been used in Austin, TX over the last several years; USPS believes that the current year demand will also follow a similar pattern. # of trucks 15 16 17 18 19 20
Probability 0.10 0.15 0.25 0.2 0.18 0.12
The weekly cost of owning and operating a mail truck at the central post office in Austin has been calculated as $600 per week. In the case of an emergency, trucks can be leased from a central USPS depot. This costs the Austin USPS location $1000.

Suppose USPS decides to keep 17 trucks locally for the holiday season. What would be the expected overall cost associated with that decision?

What is the optimal number of trucks that minimizes the overall expected cost? What is the corresponding cost?

Afinancial institution, the thriftem bank, is in the process of formulating its loan policy for the next quarter. a total of $12 million is allocated for that purpose. being a full-service facility, the bank is obligated to grant loans to different clientele. the following table provides the types of loans, the interest rate charged by the bank, and the possibility of bad debt as estimated from past experience.type of loaninterest rateprobability of bad debtpersonal.140.10car.130.07home.120.03farm.125.05commercial.100.02 bad debts are assumed unrecoverable and hence produce no interest revenue either. competition with other financial institutions in the area requires that the bank allocate at least 40% of the total funds to farm and commercial loans. to assist the housing industry in the region, home loans must equal at least 50% of the personal, car, and home loans. the bank also has a stated policy specifying that the overall ratio for bad debts on all loans may not exceed .04. formulate this problem as a linear program. define your variables clearly and write all the constraints explaining the significance of each.

Which of the following constitute the types of unemployment occurring at the natural rate of unemployment? a. frictional and cyclical unemployment.b. structural and frictional unemployment.c. cyclical and structural unemployment.d. frictional, structural, and cyclical unemployment.

Label each of the following statements true, false, or uncertain. explain your choice carefully. a. workers benefit equally from the process of creative destruction. b. in the past two decades, the real wages of low-skill u.s. workers have declined relative to the real wages of high-skill workers. c. technological progress leads to a decrease in employment if, and only if, the increase in output is smaller than the increase in productivity. d. the apparent decrease in the natural rate of unemployment in the united states in the second-half of the 1990s can be explained by the fact that productivity growth was unexpectedly high during that period.