You know the method of budgeting is being employed after hearing an experienced marketing department manager respond to a new employee's question, "How was the ad budget established last year?" by saying, "The same way it's always been done. I just have an instinct for how much should be budgeted where."

Arbitrary allocation.

Explanation:

Arbitrary allocation is a method where costs budgeted are not based on any precise measurement,hence accurate costs could not be arrived at.

This approach to budgeting breeds inefficiencies as the accurate budgeting is expected to lead to accurate costing of products as well as pricing.

All in all,the true profitability of a business cannot be ascertained.

Finally,the organization adopting this type of approach needs to change to other accurate methods of budgeting such incremental or rolling budgeting.

A) Arbitrary allocation

Explanation:

Arbitrary allocation of resources is a very commonly used method specially by experienced managers. To be honest, almost all the allocation methods are arbitrary, only that some are less obvious, e.g. percentage of sales is also arbitrary because what percentage is the correct allocation, someone decided because their previous experience favors such a number.

The manager doesn't magically come up with numbers and decides that X should be assigned to this product and Y to that product. He/she bases the decision on previous campaigns as a parameter and then he/she determines an amount.

Of course this type of resource allocation is not the best or more exact way to do it, but it is based on experience and experience also matters. What would be really problematic is that the manager is so stubborn that he/she will not adjust the balance according to the needs. You must remember that all budgets are only estimates, and estimates aren't usually 100% correct (they wouldn't be estimates if they were 100% sure). What is important is to be able to adjust your budget to correct any variances.

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