Posted: May 14th, 2015

topic

Topic 1: Case Study

The following short article appeared on page one of The Age newspaper on 16 February 2015:

A family in Cambridge received their Christmas presents from friends in Paris this week – 50 days after their parcel was posted. French posties sent it to Cambodia, and the near-20,000-kilometre trip, via several other countries, is estimated to have cost delivery firm ParcelForce $240 to deliver three children’s books.

1. How do you think the cost of $240 would have been calculated? (2 marks)

2. Regardless of the exact method used to calculate the cost of delivering the lost parcel, in what way or ways would such a calculation be subjective? Give examples to illustrate your answer. (2 marks)

3. If the parcel delivery firm did not lose the parcel, would this necessarily mean that its profit would have been $240 higher? Justify your answer. (1½ marks)

4. If the parcel delivery firm did not lose the parcel, would this necessarily mean that it would have $240 more cash? Justify your answer. (1½ marks)

5. Under what circumstances might it be contended that there was no cost associated with losing the parcel? (2 marks)

6. Might it reasonably be contended that the cost of losing the parcel could be much more than $240? (You may wish to consider here that the incident has been reported in a newspaper article that includes the name of the delivery firm.) Is this a valid way to calculate the cost of losing the parcel? (2 marks)

7. If you were asked to calculate the cost of losing the parcel, what approach would you adopt? Justify your approach and state any assumptions that you have made. (4 marks)

For Topic 1, students should be guided by the mark allocations in determining the length of their responses to each part of the topic.