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Nicolas Dupont, the owner of Chateau de Montana, a struggling (and old) boutique hotel in Crans-Montana Ski Resort, Switzerland, wished to renovate and reposition his family-owned hotel to target higher room rates. Dupont commissioned Olga Mitireva and Yulia Belopilskaya as consultants to assess the proposition. The consultants had to extract cues for the room rate of the repositioned hotel from comparable hotels. However, the room rates varied significantly across similar hotels due to their differing characteristics and locations. It was a cognitive challenge to read the patterns from a few comparable hotels. They collected the data of 200 hotels from similar locations and simulated room prices using hedonic regression models.

This study aims to use a variant from the family of discrete choice models, i.e. the logit model, to analyse the relationship between the Y dependent and X explanatory variables. This model addresses the linear probability model's main drawback by constraining the probabilities of the Y outcome between 0 and 1. The logit model also offers an extra advantage, in that it can provide odd ratio estimations.

This is a compact case written specifically to teach statistics, econometrics and research method. It has an accompanying data set for the case-users to do hands-on statistical analyses. The data set has been collected from a questionnaire survey from the students enrolled in Attitune, i.e. the music school that the case protagonist founded.

The case revolves around a relatively new music school, Attitune Music, established in July 2017 in the heart of the capital city of a northern state in Malaysia. Michael Lee Wei-Pin was the founder of Attitune Music Sdn. Bhd. He was also one of the four music instructors of Attitune Music. His speciality instruments were the guitar and the piano. The case opens with the case protagonist, Michael, pondering over Attitune’s performance in terms of its music students’ enrolment. Attitune faced a major challenge – its student enrolment had remained more or less constant since its establishment. Low and/or constant number of students could ultimately translate into stagnant or even worse, shrinking revenues for Attitune. To attract more students, Michael had been toying with the idea of injecting new elements into Attitune’s music lessons, something different from what other music schools were offering and that could be unique selling points for Attitune. With this in mind, Michael surveyed Attitune’s students to gather information that could help him gauge the potential and feasibility of his idea.

This case is well positioned to be perhaps the pioneer Malaysian teaching case to be written to teach courses in statistics, econometrics and research methods. The case can be easily adapted to teach at either the introductory or at an advanced level.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, Allied Irish Banks (AIB) was rescued by the Irish government. During 2013 and 2014, the tiny fraction of shares remaining with the public appeared to be vastly overvalued in the Irish stock market. The American Depository Receipts (ADRs) of AIB appeared to be overvalued even relative to the inflated Irish price. The case illustrates the possibility of pervasive mispricing in an illiquid market and the difficulty of valuing companies with large embedded option values.