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Question
MBA5008 Quantitative Analysis & Decision Making

Week 1 Discussion

In any business, the quality of decisions is often related to the quality of information. For instance, effective product marketing entails combining the right offering (keeping in mind that products are bundles of attributes and different bundles, or combinations of attributes, will appeal to different prospective buyers) with the right target buyer group. Knowing what constitutes the right offering and the right prospective buyer group usually involves data analysis. In general, using data to shape or guide business decisions entails a progression along the continuum of data ? information ? knowledge.

Determine the difference between data, information, and knowledge. Define the point at which data become information and information becomes knowledge.

Explain why meaningful and correct data analysis—statistics—is important in using the volumes of available business data. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

Assume you are a marketing analyst working for a manufacturer of ready-to-eat cereal. You are given detailed sales data for the past year and asked to create a report showing the differences between the four sales regions (north, south, east, and west) in terms of sales volume, profitability, and changes in sales volume and profitability; marketing expenditures and changes in marketing expenditures; and per capita sales and marketing expenditures.

Evaluate which of the four types of data (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio) is the sales data you are working on.

Compare specific statistical techniques and charts you could use to depict differences, specifically addressing each of the categories constituting your report. Determine which techniques and charts you would use. Then explain why you believe that the techniques and charts you have chosen would be appropriate. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

You are analyzing the cross-store sales of a grocery store chain. As part of your analysis, you compute two measures of central tendency—mean and median. The mean sales are $358.4 million, and the median sales are $163.1 million (per store). To quantify the average sales per store, evaluate which of the two measures would you use and why. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

MBA5008 Quantitative Analysis & Decision Making

Week 2 Discussion

You are a risk manager in a manufacturing company. One of your key responsibilities is securing of property insurance coverage to provide protection against damage caused by “acts of God,” such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc. You begin the process with exposure due diligence, which is focused on estimating the chances of a single “act of God” occurring in the course of the upcoming year, as well as the chances of two or more “acts of God” materializing (also in the course of the next year).

Determine where you might be able to find valid data for this type of analysis.

Justify the use of the concept of conditional probability in the context of your task—more specifically, discuss how you would use conditional probability in your exposure due diligence efforts. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

You are a marketing manager for a company that makes ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Your company recently initiated a loyalty program for consumers, which resulted in a large purchaser database. The brand managers are eager to examine the available data, which they can use to design more effective promotional programs. Your first step is to conduct an exploratory baseline analysis, the goal of which is to describe the buyer base and estimate basic statistical descriptors of the buyer base. You are particularly interested in the size of individual purchases, as well as the frequency of repurchases.

Evaluate what discrete data distribution the frequency of repurchases data would be likely to follow.

Explain why the other discrete data distributions are not appropriate for this data. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

You are a marketing manager for a manufacturer of nonperishable products sold in grocery stores. In this role, you need to make various decisions about how much marketing/advertising support is needed by each product to maximize the profitability of the organization.

Assess how the effectiveness of individual marketing/advertising approaches would be determined.

Discuss how historical sales data, as well as promotional response data, can aid you in evaluating the effectiveness of the individual marketing/advertising approaches. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

MBA5008 Quantitative Analysis & Decision Making

Week 3 Discussion

You are designing a direct marketing campaign for an online clothing retailer. As part of your design, you quantify the expected response rates by ethnic group. Your definition of the term “ethnicity” follows that of the U.S. Census Bureau (e.g., Hispanic, Asian, African American, etc.). You want to test your campaign using 1,000 randomly selected households, but you want your sample to mimic the US population in terms of the proportion of different ethnicities (e.g., if Hispanics constitute about 12 percent of the US population, 12 percent of your sample should be Hispanic).

Assess the appropriateness of using a simple random sample as the test’s sampling plan.

Evaluate other potential sampling plans, and describe why such other sampling plans might be more or less appropriate than using a simple random sample. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

You are a manager working for an insurance company. Your job entails processing individual claims filed by policyholders. In general, few claims are expensive. Each quarter, you compile a report summarizing key claim statistics, such as the number of claims submitted, the average cost per claim, and the total cost of submitted claims. In the last quarter’s report, you notice a large difference between the mean and the median claim cost, the mean cost being much higher than the median cost.

Draw a conclusion as to why you might be observing this difference in the data.

Evaluate whether this information might be useful for determining if the claims data is normally distributed.

If you conclude that the data is likely normally distributed, explain why. If not, suggest another distribution that might best describe the data. Explain why this distribution would be a more accurate representation of the data.

Given the large difference between the two measures of central tendency, which of the two measures would you rely on in describing the average claim cost and why? Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

You are an inventory manager working for a large online retailer. As with any retailer, inventory control is one of the critical success factors for the organization. Having too little inventory risks the loss of sales when your company is unable to fulfill an order. However, too much inventory imposes unnecessary costs on the organization. Often, one of the most important pieces of information that can be used to determine how much inventory to have on hand is the rate at which demand occurs for the product.

Determine what information you would need to construct a confidence interval for the demand that will occur during a month.

Analyze how the numbers of such a confidence interval might influence the level of inventory that the organization chooses to carry. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

MBA5008 Quantitative Analysis & Decision Making

Week 4 Discussion

You are a marketing manager for a company that makes ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Your company recently initiated a loyalty program for consumers, which resulted in a large purchaser database. The brand managers are eager to mine the available data, which they can use to design more effective promotional programs. The management of your organization believes that to be effective, these programs have to take into account significant cross-region (i.e., the East Coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, and the South) purchase differences. Your task is to test the hypothesis that there are significant cross-region differences in purchasing patterns. Management has suggested that you use six different two-way comparisons (directly comparing each region with every other region), with each two-way comparison being suggested at the 5% level.

Assess how appropriate management’s proposed use of hypothesis testing would be to validate management’s belief in cross-region purchase differences.

Explain the goal of this hypothesis testing experiment.

Describe the mechanics of this hypothesis testing process.

Explain why the organization would go through the trouble of hypothesis testing in this situation. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

You are a manager working for an insurance company. Your job entails processing individual claims filed by policyholders. In general, most claims are relatively minor, costwise, but a few are quite expensive. Each quarter, you compile a report summarizing key claims statistics that includes the number of claims submitted, the mean cost per claim, the median cost per claim, the proportion of claims being litigated, the number of emergency procedures, the proportion of men versus women, and the average age of claimants. Your measures are computed separately for the southern and northern regions, and you are interested in determining whether or not there are statistically significant differences between the two regions on each of the aforementioned measures.

Evaluate which comparisons would require the use of the t-test and which would use the chi-squared test.

Explain your answers. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

In the past several weeks, you have been introduced to a range of statistical data analysis tools. Consider what you have learned in the context of progression of data, information, and knowledge. What are the specific techniques you would consider most helpful in transforming information into knowledge (as opposed to just translating data into information)? Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

MBA5008 Quantitative Analysis & Decision Making

Week 5 Discussion

As a marketing analyst, you are responsible for estimating the level of sales associated with different marketing mix allocation scenarios. You have historical sales data, as well as promotional response data, for each of the elements of the marketing mix.

Describe the differences between the forecasting methods that can be used.

Evaluate the forecasting methods in relation to the given scenario.

Choose a forecasting method and justify your choice. If you make any assumptions, state them explicitly. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

In general, short-term forecasts are more accurate than long-term forecasts. The same is true for forecasts where cyclical or seasonal factors are fairly well defined and repeatable.

Describe the factors that influence the reliability of time-series forecasts.

Evaluate the circumstances that would cause a time-series model to offer a fairly reliable forecast.

Locate information about a company that uses one of the types of time-series models to forecast demand and describe both the organization and the type of product(s) that they use time-series models to forecast.

Explain why the time-series model that is currently being used is the most reasonable model for the company to use or describe an alternate time-series model that would be more appropriate for the company to use.

If you suggest a change in the time-series model being used by the company, predict how the company you have chosen will improve because of that specific time-series model. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

Experience teaches us that the bulk of the technical material covered in this course will, unfortunately, be forgotten shortly thereafter. If you were to commit just three concepts you have learned in this course to your long-term memory, which concepts would you select and why?

Evaluate the applicability of each of the concepts that you’ve selected to a business environment in which you have worked in the past (or with which you might be familiar).

Describe how you would apply each of the concepts. Be specific.

Explain your goal in applying each concept to the environment that you have described.