Statistics for Business: Decision Making and Analysis (2nd Edition)

In Statistics for Business: Decision Making and Analysis, authors Robert Stine and Dean Foster of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, take a sophisticated approach to teaching statistics in the context of making good business decisions. The authors show students how to recognize and understand each business question, use statistical tools to do the analysis, and how to communicate their results clearly and concisely. In addition to providing cases and real data to demonstrate real business situations, this text provides resources to support understanding and engagement. A successful problem-solving framework in the 4-M Examples (Motivation, Method, Mechanics, Message) model a clear outline for solving problems, new What Do You Think questions give students an opportunity to stop and check their understanding as they read, and new learning objectives guide students through each chapter and help them to review major goals. Software Hints provide instructions for using the most up-to-date technology packages. The Second Edition also includes expanded coverage and instruction of Excel^® 2010.

Robert Stine holds a PhD from Princeton University. He has taught at the Wharton School since 1983, during which time he has regularly taught business statistics. During his tenure, Bob has received a variety of teaching awards. Bob also actively consults for industry. His clients include the pharmaceutical firms Merck and Pfizer, and he regularly works with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia on models for retail credit risk. This collaboration has produced three well-received conferences held at Wharton. His areas of research include computer software, time series analysis and forecasting, and general problems related to model identification and selection. Bob has published numerous articles in research journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Biometrika, and The Annals of Statistics. He was recently awarded the 2011 Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award for outstanding teaching quality at the Wharton School.

 

Dean Foster holds a PhD from the University of Maryland. He has taught at the Wharton School since 1992 and previously taught at the University of Chicago. Dean teaches courses in introductory business statistics, probability and Markov chains, statistical computing, and advanced statistics for managers. Dean’s research areas are statistical inference for stochastic processes, game theory, machine learning, and variable selection. He is published in a wide variety of journals, including The Annals of Statistics, Operations Research, Games and Economic Behaviour, Journal of Theoretical Population Biology, and Econometrica.

 

Bob Stine and Dean Foster have co-authored two casebooks: Basic Business Statistics (Springer-Verlag) and Business Analysis Using Regression (Springer-Verlag). These casebooks offer a collection of data analysis examples that motivate and illustrate key ideas of statistics, ranging from standard error to regression diagnostics and time series analysis. They also have collaborated on a number of research articles.