Answer to Question 1
Answer: A
Explanation: Managers who use the economic order quantity (EOQ) model are looking primarily to make both carrying costs, such as money tied up in inventory, taxes, and storage, and ordering costs, which include processing and paperwork costs, to a minimum.
Answer to Question 2
Answer: The two factors are information asymmetry and cultural values. Information asymmetry refers to a difference in the quality and amount of information available to two or more individuals or groups. For example, let's assume that a company's headquarters in the United States instructed an employee to increase the staffing of its factory in New Delhi, India, by 10 percent in 2014. The headquarters will adopt this goal as a performance criterion come time to conduct the expatriate's performance appraisal. At the end of the year, the staffing increased by only 4 percent, which leads the company headquarters to judge the expatriate's performance as negative. The expatriate has learned from immersion in his job that illiteracy or substandard pay relative to the cost of living contributed dramatically to the result. However, the corporate headquarters does not have intimate knowledge of local conditions in New Delhi and simply attributed the outcome to an ineffective expatriate. Cultural norms influence the adoption of performance appraisal practices. In China and Japan, performance feedback is uncommon because the normative practice of saving face is well-ingrained in those cultures. Giving negative performance feedback would cast the employee in a negative light. There is some evidence to suggest that performance appraisal practices performed by companies within high power distance cultures rely on the manager or supervisor as the single source of judgment. Where power distance is lower, it is not unusual for companies to solicit performance information from multiple sources. In individualistic cultures, performance appraisal seeks to differentiate employees based on performance. In contrast, performance appraisals in collectivist cultures generally do not focus on individual performance because negative performance information could hurt the solidarity of group members.