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The senior staff accountant was conducting an audit for a bank client. As part of the audit, the senior staff accountant needed to verify the total interest expenses and revenues reported by the bank during the 2004 fiscal year. He had gathered data on total interest revenues and expenses as reported by the bank, as well as, the prime rate as reported by the Bank of Canada. The staff accountant intends to use linear regression to examine the relationships between revenue and interest rates and between expenses and interest rates as a way of identifying outliers that may require more detailed attention as part of the audit.

The head of clinical trials at Solnyx Pharmaceuticals had just been handed the results of a phase II trial of Atoxeril, a hypertension drug. Her task was to interpret these data in preparation for a meeting with her institutional review board and representatives of the Food and Drug Administration. This case introduces a number of concepts related to the analysis of clinical trials including dealing with missing data, ANOVA, regression and sample size calculations. Students will evaluate the design of the phase II clinical trial and interpret the trial results; they will also evaluate the implications of the angioedema incidence and how it might affect the design of a phase III trial.

A doctor is preparing for an upcoming meeting of the Ontario Drug Quality and Therapeutics committee. At this meeting the committee would need to make a decision about adding six new drugs to the Ontario formulary. The doctor needed to review the clinical and economic evidence on each drug in order to take a position on each at the meeting. The case introduces students to the concept of formularies and presents six representative cases for class discussion.

The head of clinical trials at Solnyx Pharmaceuticals had just been handed the results of a phase II trial of Atoxeril, a hypertension drug. Her task was to interpret these data in preparation for a meeting with her institutional review board and representatives of the Food and Drug Administration. This case introduces a number of concepts related to the analysis of clinical trials including dealing with missing data, ANOVA, regression and sample size calculations. Students will evaluate the design of the phase II clinical trial and interpret the trial results; they will also evaluate the implications of the angioedema incidence and how it might affect the design of a phase III trial.

Acushnet Canada Inc. is considering using Canada Customs Bonded Warehouses to store golf shoes, gloves, outerwear and club heads inventory purchased from overseas suppliers. ACI often has to procure inventory four to six months before they needs it in order to ensure they will be able to meet customer requirements during the busy season. The critical managerial issue is considering the tradeoff between the cash flow savings (through duty postponement) and the need to meet the demand schedule, while taking into account storage limitations imposed by the private facility and their storage costs. This case can be used as an introduction to linear programming as well as an introduction to the concept of bonded warehouses.

This case presents some information on the NCAA college basketball tournament and suggests a method for estimating the outcomes of games. The probability of winning is modeled as a normal distribution where the mean is based on a team's ratings. Students will be introduced to the normal distribution, sums of normal random variables and event simulations.

Palmyra Trading Company imports commodities from Europe and Asia for sale in the Syrian wholesale market. The vice-president has been advised that the company is still in contention in a tender bid, but has been asked to submit a new bid at a lower cost. The vice-president is aware that a competitor was in the same situation. The vice-president must determine the range of bids the company could make to secure the contract and perform a sensitivity analysis to determine his options under various assumptions about the actions of competitors in the bidding process. A simple model can be constructed to analyze the bidding problem and determine the bid range.

A real estate appraiser has been hired by a law firm as a consultant in a dispute over the price of a piece of commercial real estate. He used traditional methods of real estate valuation, whereas the opponents in the dispute used multiple linear regression analysis to determine the value of the property, and arrived at a higher estimate. The appraiser has never used linear regression analysis before but needs to respond to this alternate valuation method.