Statistics for Business and Economics

Dr. Jim McClave is currently President and CEO of Info Tech, Inc., a statistical consulting and software development firm with an international clientele. He is an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at the University of Florida, where he was a full-time member of the faculty for 20 years. P. George Benson is the 21st president of the College of Charleston. Prior to his appointment, he was Dean at the University of Georgia's C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry College of Business. His research interests include quality management, strategic management, belief formation, and judgmental forecasting. He consults nationally in the areas of applied statistics, quality management, and employment discrimination. Terry Sincich obtained his PhD in statistics from the University of Florida in 1980. He is an Associate Professor in the Information Systems & Decision Sciences Department at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Dr. Sincich is responsible for teaching basic statistics to all undergraduates in the College of Business, as well as advanced statistics to all business doctoral candidates. He has published articles in such journals as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, International Journal of Forecasting, Academy of Management Journal, and Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory. Dr. Sincich is a co-author of the texts Statistics, A First Course in Statistics, Statistics for Engineering & the Sciences, and A Second Course in Statistics: Regression Analysis.

1. Statistics, Data, and Statistical Thinking

1.1 The Science of Statistics

1.2 Types of Statistical Applications in Business

1.3 Fundamental Elements of Statistics

1.4 Processes (Optional)

1.5 Types of Data

1.6 Collecting Data: Sampling and Related Issues

1.7 Critical Thinking with Statistics

Statistics in Action: A 20/20 View of Surveys: Fact or Fiction?

Activity 1.1: Keep the Change: Collecting Data

Activity 2.2: Identifying Misleading Statistics

Using Technology: Accessing and Listing Data; Random Sampling



2. Methods for Describing Sets of Data

2.1 Describing Qualitative Data

2.2 Graphical Methods for Describing Quantitative Data

2.3 Numerical Measures of Central Tendency

2.4 Numerical Measures of Variability

2.5 Using the Mean and Standard Deviation to Describe Data

2.6 Numerical Measures of Relative Standing

2.7 Methods for Detecting Outliers: Box Plots and z-Scores

2.8 Graphing Bivariate Relationships (Optional)

2.9 The Time Series Plot (Optional)

2.10 Distorting the Truth with Descriptive Techniques

Statistics in Action: Can Money Buy Love?

Activity 2.1: Real Estate Sales

Activity 2.2: Keep the Change: Measures of Central Tendency and Variability

Using Technology: Describing Data

Making Business Decisions: The Kentucky Milk CasePart 1 (Covers Chapters 1 and 2)



3. Probability

3.1 Events, Sample Spaces, and Probability

3.2 Unions and Intersections

3.3 Complementary Events

3.4 The Additive Rule and Mutually Exclusive Events

3.5 Conditional Probability

3.6 The Multiplicative Rule and Independent Events

3.7 Bayes's Rule

Statistics in Action: Lotto Buster!

Activity 3.1: Exit Polls: Conditional Probability

Activity 3.2: Keep the Change: Independent Events

Using Technology: Combinations and Permutations



4. Random Variables and Probability Distributions