Activity I – A manager claims that increases in advertising expenditure will surely raise the firm’s profits, citing his sense that people find the firm’s ads entertaining.
1: Sketch how you might refute this claim using:
a: A theoretical argument
b: Data
2: Why might the refutation using data be more convincing?
Activity II – A grocery store manager is interested in the data-generating process for her store’s weekly soda sales. She believes factors impacting these sales include price, product placement, and whether the week contains a holiday. Write out a formal representation of the data-generation process for weekly soda sales that incorporates these and additional factors.
Activity III – Access the dataset Sales and Costs.xlsx (See the attached) and answer the following questions.
1: Calculate these descriptive statistics.
a: Mean of sales
b: Variance of materials costs
c: Covariance of labor e: costs and materials costs
d: Mean of labor costs
e: Total sales
2: Calculate at least two more descriptive statistics for this dataset.
Text book Title: Predictive Analytics for Business Strategy
Subtitle: Reasoning from Data to Actionable Knowledge
ISBN: 978-1-259-19151-0
Authors: Jeffrey T. Prince
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Publication Date: 2019
