Financial Instruments and Marketable Securities

9 Months Ended

Sep. 30, 2014

Financial Instruments and Marketable Securities [Abstract]

Financial Instruments and Marketable Securities

(2) Financial Instruments and Marketable Securities

Due to the varying short-term cash needs of our business, we periodically have marketable securities. We value these assets utilizing a fair value hierarchy that prioritizes the inputs to valuation techniques used to measure fair value. The hierarchy gives the highest priority to unadjusted quoted prices in active markets for identical assets and liabilities (Level 1) and the lowest priority to measurements involving unobservable inputs (Level 3). The three levels of the fair value hierarchy and how they are determined are defined in our 2013 annual report on Form 10-K in Note 1 of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements. Based on our short-term cash needs, we did not have any marketable securities as of September 30, 2014.