Business Statistics for Competitive Advantage with Excel 2016

The revised Fourth Edition of this popular textbook is redesigned with Excel 2016 to encourage business students to develop competitive advantages for use in their future careers as decision makers. Students learn to build models using logic and experience, produce statistics using Excel 2016 with shortcuts, and translate results into implications for decision makers. The textbook features new examples and assignments on global markets, including cases featuring Chipotle and Costco.

Exceptional managers know that they can create competitive advantages by basing decisions on performance response under alternative scenarios, and managers need to understand how to use statistics to create such advantages. Statistics, from basic to sophisticated models, are illustrated with examples using real data such as students will encounter in their roles as managers. A number of examples focus on business in emerging global markets with particular emphasis on emerging markets in Latin America, China, and India. Results are linked to implications for decision making with sensitivity analyses to illustrate how alternate scenarios can be compared.

The author emphasizes communicating results effectively in plain English and with screenshots and compelling graphics in the form of memos and PowerPoints. Chapters include screenshots to make it easy to conduct analyses in Excel 2016. PivotTables and PivotCharts, used frequently in business, are introduced from the start. The Fourth Edition features Monte Carlo simulation in four chapters, as a tool to illustrate the range of possible outcomes from decision makers' assumptions and underlying uncertainties. Model building with regression is presented as a process, adding levels of sophistication, with chapters on multicollinearity and remedies, forecasting and model validation, autocorrelation and remedies, indicator variables to represent segment differences, and seasonality, structural shifts or shocks in time series