The fleet manager of a major cosmetics company has to make a decision on the type of car that the company should purchase for the company's sales representatives. The decision will be based on the purchase cost of the cars (COST), their reputation for reliability (RELIABILTY), the image of the company that they project (IMAGE), the interval (in miles) between services (SERVICE) and the extent to which the car includes safety features (SAFETY). The costs of the five models being considered are set out below, together with scores that have been assigned to the cars to measure their performance on the non-monetary attributes (0 = worst car on that attribute, 100 = best).

The manager is then asked to rank the desirability of swings from the worst to the best positions on each non-monetary attribute. The resulting ranks are set out below (1=most desirable swing).

1. Worst reliability to best

2. Worst image to best

3. Worst service interval to best

4. Worst safety features to best

(a) Does the above ranking suggest that the company gives a relatively low priority to the safety of its sales representatives? Give reasons for your answer.

(b) SMARTER was used to obtain the following aggregate scores for the non-monetary attributes.

Demonstrate and explain how the aggregate score for the Benault Series A model was obtained.

(c) Identify the model or models that appear on the efficient frontier and interpret your result.

(d) If the weights for the non-monetary attributes had been obtained using the rank-sum method what would these weights have been?

Pease use the following weights for this problem ( as obtained from table 4.1 of the text book for 4 attributes).

Reliability: 52.1

Image: 27.1

Service Interval 14.6

Safety Features 6.3