Bianca is conducting an experiment to determine how temperatures affect the productivity of employees. she has just completed the first phase of her experiment, in which she had a group of employees perform job-related tasks in a special room where the temperature was 10 degrees cooler than on the factory floor. the employees in the experimental group consistently outperformed employees in the factory. the hawthorne effect suggests that the most likely reason for this improvement in performance is that the cooler working conditions allowed the employees in the experiment to work harder without getting tired.

Total marketing effort is a term used to describe the critical decision factors that affect demand: price, advertising, distribution, and product quality. define the variable x to represent total marketing effort. a typical model that is used to predict demand as a function of total marketing effort is based on the power function: d = axb suppose that a is a positive number. different model forms result from varying the constant b. sketch the graphs of this model for b = 0, b = 1, 0< b< 1, b< 0, and b> 1. (we encourage you to use excel to do this.) what does each model tell you about the relationship between demand and marketing effort? what assumptions are implied? are they reasonable? how would you go about selecting the appropriate model?