Description:

Effective management decision making requires operating experience with quantitative information and analysis. Johnson and Wichern's new business statistics text offers students experience in dealing with real data and numerous opportunities to see how data analysis and inference can effect sound business decisions. "Statistics in Context" sections in each chapter present a set of real data and a complete case description from prominent international businesses and let students see how these executives use statistical tools in day to day operations. Students are offered realistic learning environments where introductory methods are used in real business problems and decision-oriented interpretation of analysis performed.

The text casts statistical methods as useful tools for generating, summarizing, and analyzing numerical information with the general goal of improving processes and products, and adding economic value to the organization. Examples, exercises and cases reinforce the assumption that statistical thinking is an important part of competitively driven decision making. They depict the firm as a system susceptible to analysis for understanding and improving its processes through the use of statistics. Johnson and Wichern indicate how the material in this book "fits into the larger organizational picture," and attempt to emphasize the "why" more than the "how."

Business Statistics is organized into six topical areas: 1) Data description and summary, 2) Data Collection, 3) Foundations for inference (probability rules and distributions) 4) Inferences about means and proportions, 5) Linear Models, 6) Statistics and Management. There is more than enough material for a quarter or one semester course. The flexible organization allows an instructor to change or abbreviate the Table of Contents in many ways, some of which are suggested in the preface. Ideal for a one or two semester course in business statistics at the undergraduate or MBA level.

Features:

• Statistics in Context explore the way real companies have used statistics to develop business strategies while tying together chapter concepts.

• Text assumes availability of computer for student analysis. Many examples depict MINITAB as an analytic tool. Important exercises are on a floppy disk in ASCII file format.

• Over 900 end-of-chapter problems provide instructors with a wide assortment of problems for assignments. The problems range from simple drill to large data set analyses requiring the use of computer software.

• Emphasis on problem solving and decision making to improve quality present Statistics in a non-threatening and relevant fashion.

• Chapter 4, Collecting Data includes an extensive section on questionnaire design, suitabe for group project assignments.

• The discussion of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for a given population parameter appears in a single Chapter 8 and identifies the relationship between the two techniques as well as the interpretation of P-values in the context of hypothesis testing.

• The authors emphasize residual analysis as a form of model (assumption) criticism.

• aChapter 13, Statistics in Management, summarizes and illustrates in practical contexts the concepts of system, process and process improvement in association with the specific methods the text has offered in earlier

Supplements:

• Instructor's Manual
  ISBN: 0-471-13999-8
  Complete worked out solutions to all the problems in the text prepared by the texts' authors.

• The Wiley Statistics Home Page
  at http://www.wiley.com/stats
  Complete Normal distribution, t and z tables. Provides detailed information on this and other Wiley texts, plus information on how to order study aids.

• Minitab
  Wiley offers this powerful statistical software package bundled at a discount with all of our statistics texts. Available with Business Statistics using ISBN 0-471-17534-X

• Data Disk
  ISBN: 0-471-14006-6
  Provides students with easily manipulable data from the cases throughout the text. Also available via ftp from the Wiley homepage.

• Test Bank
  ISBN 0-471-14001-5
  A full complement of exam questions for use in your course

• Computerized Test Bank
  ISBN: 0-471-14002-3
  Provides you with a tool to randomly generate exams from the stock of test questions available in the print version.