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The revised Fourth Edition of this popular textbook is redesigned with Excel 2016 to encourage business students to develop competitive advantages for use in their future careers as decision makers. Students learn to build models using logic and experience, produce statistics using Excel 2016 with shortcuts, and translate results into implications for decision makers. The textbook features new examples and assignments on global markets, including cases featuring Chipotle and Costco. A number of examples focus on business in emerging global markets with particular emphasis on emerging markets in Latin America, China, and India. Results are linked to implications for decision making with sensitivity analyses to illustrate how alternate scenarios can be compared.
The author emphasises communicating results effectively in plain English and with screenshots and compelling graphics in the form of memos and PowerPoints. Chapters include screenshots to make it easy to conduct analyses in Excel 2016. PivotTables and PivotCharts, used frequently in business, are introduced from the start. The Fourth Edition features Monte Carlo simulation in four chapters, as a tool to illustrate the range of possible outcomes from decision makers' assumptions and underlying uncertainties. Model building with regression is presented as a process, adding levels of sophistication, with chapters on multicollinearity and remedies, forecasting and model validation, auto-correlation and remedies, indicator variables to represent segment differences, and seasonality, structural shifts or shocks in time series models. Special applications in market segmentation and portfolio analysis are offered, and an introduction to conjoint analysis is included. Nonlinear models are motivated with arguments of diminishing or increasing marginal response.
List of contents
Statistics for Decision Making and Competitive Advantage.- Describing your Data.- Hypothesis Tests, Confidence Intervals to Infer Population Characteristics and Differences.- Simulation to Infer Future Performance Levels Given Assumptions.- Simple Regression for Long Range Forecasts.- Consolidating Multiple Naïve Forecasts with Monte Carlo.- Presenting Statistical Analysis Results to Management.- Finance Application: Portfolio Analysis with a Market Index as a Leading Indicator in Simple Linear Regression.- Association between Two Categorical Variables: Contingency Analysis with Chi Square.- Building Multiple Regression Models.- Indicator Variables.- Model Building and Forecasting with Multicollinear Time Series.- Nonlinear Multiple Regression Models.- Nonlinear Explanatory Multiple Regression Models.
About the author
Cynthia Fraser received her Ph.D. from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and is a member of the Marketing faculty at The McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, where she teaches business statistics. Her research has appeared in a number of journals, including
Decision Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies,and
Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Summary
The revised Fourth Edition of this popular textbook is redesigned with Excel 2016 to encourage business students to develop competitive advantages for use in their future careers as decision makers. Students learn to build models using logic and experience, produce statistics using Excel 2016 with shortcuts, and translate results into implications for decision makers. The textbook features new examples and assignments on global markets, including cases featuring Chipotle and Costco. A number of examples focus on business in emerging global markets with particular emphasis on emerging markets in Latin America, China, and India. Results are linked to implications for decision making with sensitivity analyses to illustrate how alternate scenarios can be compared.
The author emphasises communicating results effectively in plain English and with screenshots and compelling graphics in the form of memos and PowerPoints. Chapters include screenshots to make it easy to conduct analyses in Excel 2016. PivotTables and PivotCharts, used frequently in business, are introduced from the start. The Fourth Edition features Monte Carlo simulation in four chapters, as a tool to illustrate the range of possible outcomes from decision makers’ assumptions and underlying uncertainties. Model building with regression is presented as a process, adding levels of sophistication, with chapters on multicollinearity and remedies, forecasting and model validation, auto-correlation and remedies, indicator variables to represent segment differences, and seasonality, structural shifts or shocks in time series models. Special applications in market segmentation and portfolio analysis are offered, and an introduction to conjoint analysis is included. Nonlinear models are motivated with arguments of diminishing or increasing marginal response.
