Argosy University
COURSE SYLLABUS
MGT341
Managing Decision Models
Faculty Information
Faculty Name: Maryam Hafezi. MS
Campus: SF Bay area
Contact Information:
Office Hours: By appointment only
Short Faculty Bio: 10 years experience in clinical research and management, degree in Statics and Research design.
Course Start Date: 6/29
Course End Date: 8/19
Course in class meeting dates: 7/21-22, 8/11-8/12
Course description: Problem analysis and evaluation techniques are presented. Students are shown methods for defining, researching, analyzing, and evaluating a problem they would solve in their work or vocational environment. Specific statistical information covered in the course includes identifying and measuring objectives, formulating hypotheses, collecting data, working with levels of significance, analyzing variance, and constructing questionnaires.
Course Pre-requisites: None
Required Textbook:
Siegel, A. (2002). Practical Business Statistics. McGraw-Hill. ISBN: 0072821256
Optional Textbook:
Gonick, L & Smith, W. (1998) The cartoon guide to statistics. Harper Perennial. ISBN: 0062731025
Technology: Pentium III CPU/ Windows 98; 128MB RAM, printer; Microsoft Office Acrobat (full version), Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 (PC) 5.0 (MAC) or Netscape Navigator 4.08. Norton Antivirus.
Course length: 7.5 Weeks Contact Hours: 45 Hours Credit Value: 3.0
Program Objectives:
1. Communication
2. Communicate business concepts effectively, both written and orally appropriate to the audience.
3.1 Define the attributes of an effective team member and leader and the characteristics of an effective team in reaching specific business goals
3.2 Problem Solving – Given a business problem, select and defend a business solution chosen from specific alternatives
3.3 Information Literacy – Given a business research question, access information from a variety of sources, select appropriate sources to respond to a business question
4.1 Integration – Describe the interrelationship of the functional business areas of statistics, accounting, operations, finance, marketing, and strategy
3. Ethics/Diversity
5.1 Diversity – Identify the issues and challenges related to diversity in current business organizations
5.2 Ethics – Identify the issues and challenges related to ethics in current business organizations
1st assignment due first day of course: 08/20/2007
· Log on line and answer the first discussion question: At night they come without being fetched, at day they leave without out leaving a trace, what could they be? How could the process of answering a riddle relate to decision models?
· Please read the 1st chapter of the required reading Siegel, A. (2002).
The assignments will be posted each week on line, please log on each week.
Assignments:
Group Presentation: An in class presentation utilizing the online and in class assignments, readings and lessons. Presentations will be made during in class sessions, times to be determined. A few Web sites that you can visit to learn about PowerPoint are:
http://www.actden.com/pp/
http://www.mightycoach.com/articles/powerpoint/
Weekly Assignment journal: A write up to the discussion questions posted on the web assignment board. Please include notes from readings, and other materials as is appropriate. This write up can be handwritten and is your opportunity to be creative in approaching the questions posted. Journals will be due on the first day of each week end in class meeting and returned at the end of the second day of each weekend class meeting.
Participation on line: It is mandatory to participate, answer discussion questions, raise questions and bring in real life scenarios to the discussion board. Please post at least two comments per week.
Class paper: This paper will be due the last day of class, please choose one discussion question posted on the board and expand on the answer utilizing in class readings, real life experience, and other materials. Please focus on decision models and team management as well as Identifying the issues and challenges related to diversity and ethnicity as is applicable in current business organization.
Module / Module Topics / Readings / Assignments1 / · Introduction to Business Statistics
o Role of Statistics in Business Decision-Making
· Data Sets
o Collecting and Understanding Data
o Quantitative and Qualitative Variables
· Describing Data
o Graphical Representation of Data
o Normal Distribution
· Summarizing Data
o Central Tendency
o Variability
/ Supplemental
Sigel
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5 / Discussion Questions:
1. Refer to the data provided.
Discuss how you would use a graphical method to decide if any of the following variables are approximately normally distributed:
a. Annual salary
b. Age
c. Experience
Provide a rationale for your response.
2. The only way to summarize a set of data is by calculating a measure of central tendency and variability. Do you agree with this statement? Explain your reasoning using at least two examples.
3. Compare and contrast descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Which is a better method of data analysis and why? Illustrate your answer by providing at least two examples from day- to -day life.
Assignments:
1. Department Store Data Categorization
You are a marketing executive of a department store. The marketing manager of the store is required to conduct training on how to collect qualitative and quantitative data. As part of the training material the marketing manager wants to provide the trainees with a handout on examples of qualitative and quantitative data.
a. You have at your disposal the following information:
b. The names of products
c. A description of the products
d. The productivity of employees
e. Health-related information for each employee
f. The names of the product’s distributors
g. The distributors’ phone numbers and other contact details
h. The universal product codes
i. A store’s stock keeping unit numbers
j. The number of units in the inventory at any time
k. The change in the price of each product over a year
l. The current price of the products
m. The number of units of products sold each year for the past two years
n. The names of various departments
Prepare a two-page handout for the marketing manager segregating the above list into qualitative and quantitative data. Provide a rationale for your response.
Prepare your handout in a Microsoft Word document.
2 / · Introduction to Probability
o Measuring Uncertainty and Randomness
· Single and Multiple Events
· Mutual Exclusivity and Statistical Independence
· Binomial and Normal Distributions / Supplemental
Siegel
Chapter 6
Chapter 7 / Discussion Questions:
1. As a contestant on a television game show, you are shown three closed boxes. The host of the game show tells you that one of the three boxes contains a valuable prize; the other two boxes are empty. You are asked to choose a box.
One of the two boxes you did not choose is opened; it is empty. Now you are asked whether you would like to stay with your original choice or change your choice to the other unopened box.
Assuming you want to maximize the probability of winning the prize, would you stick with your original choice? Why or why not?
Explain any assumptions you have made in arriving at the conclusion.
2. Discuss the relationship between conditional probabilities and statistical independence. Illustrate your discussion with examples of two events that are statistically independent and two events that are not statistically independent.
Provide examples of two events that are statistically independent because of how they are defined.
Assignments:
1. Risk Analysis
You are a risk analyst at Max Inc., which operates 15 manufacturing plants in the United States. Industry experts predict that the next year will be a bad one for your industry and 70 percent of the manufacturing plants like yours in the United States will operate at a loss.
The COO of your company has to provide an assessment of this prediction in the next monthly shareholders’ meeting. To help her in this assessment she asks you to determine the probability that 12 or more of your 15 manufacturing plants will incur losses next year.
Provide your response to the COO in the form of a two-page e-mail note in a Word document. Explain how you arrived at your answer, and state any assumptions you made.
2. Final Project Activity
The VP of Marketing wants to know the role of discount coupons in stimulating sales. Busy Bee currently accepts manufacturers’ coupons but not coupons from competing supermarkets. Neither does it engage in marketing promotions that may increase the value of the coupons.
Prepare a report of three-to-five pages addressed to the VP of Marketing. Your report should contain answers to the following:
a. Are shoppers who pay by cash more or less likely to use coupons?
b. Are women who shop alone more or less likely to use coupons?
c. In what other ways do shoppers who use coupons differ from shoppers who don’t?
Refer to the following Web site for guidelines on how to draft a report:
http://www.learningservices.gcal.ac.uk/els/reports/
4 / · Populations and Samples
· Parameters and Statistics
· Sampling
· Random Sampling
· Statistical Inference
· Central Limit Theorem
o Standard Error / Supplemental
Siegel
Chapter 8 / Discussion Questions:
1. You are the general manager of a department store. One hundred randomly chosen customers have rated on a scale of 1 to 10 their level of satisfaction with the goods purchased from your store.
What can you infer about the level of satisfaction of all your customers from the results of the survey? Identify the three limitations to such inferences. In the light of those limitations explain the importance of the Central Limit Theorem in making inferences about the population of all your customers.
2. Give four examples of sampling problems that can be studied statistically. In each case define the population and the sample.
Give an example of two sampling problems in which the population in one problem can be a sample in the other.
3. You work as an HR manager in City Scan company. You want to find out if your company’s employees are satisfied with the medical insurance benefits provided by the company. It would be too expensive and time-consuming to survey all the employees. Describe the method you would use to select a sample of employees to be surveyed. Provide at least three reasons for your choice of method.
4. Opinion polls attempt to predict the results of the elections. Discuss six reasons why the results of the opinion poll and the outcome of the election may differ. In each case describe techniques that can be used to increase the likelihood of the results being accurate.
5 / · Confidence Levels
· Confidence Intervals
o Confidence Interval for the Mean
· Hypothesis Testing / Supplemental
Siegel
Chapter 9 / Discussion Questions:
1. Compare and contrast the procedures for estimating the population parameters from the statistics of a sample and the sample statistics from the parameters of a population. Illustrate your answer by providing two examples of each procedure.
2. The null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis are mutually exclusive. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Rationalize your response by providing at least two examples.
3. Discuss two possible outcomes of a hypothesis testing procedure. Illustrate your response by providing at least two examples from day-to-day life of the possible outcomes of hypothesis testing.
Assignments (Team 5):
1. Royal Charted Bank
You are a bank manager with Royal Chartered Bank. The bank you work for is going to open a new branch in a city that is growing rapidly.
The bank has to decide which products and services to offer from the new branch. For example it can offer home equity loans. Based on the past data the bank knows that the demand for its various products depends on the income levels of its prospective customers. The bank conducts a random survey of the salaries of the local people in the city that has the new branch. You have to present your findings of the survey in the weekly staff meeting.
Using the data provided estimate the mean annual salary in the community, and construct a 95 percent confidence interval for the mean annual salary.
Present your findings in a two-page report.
`
2. Copier Paper Specifications
You are a quality analyst with John and Sons Company. Your company manufactures fax machines, copiers, and printers that use plain paper. The CEO of the company wants the machines to handle 99.5 percent of all the paper that is used in them without the paper getting jammed. The CEO asks you to determine the thickness of paper that the machines must be able to handle to achieve this target. Using the data provided prepare a two-page memo to the CEO in a Word document, detailing the appropriate confidence limits for the thickness of paper that the machines must be able to handle.
6 / · Hypothesis Testing for One Mean
· Hypothesis Testing for Two Independent Samples
· Hypothesis Testing for Two Dependent Samples / Siegel
Chapter 10 / Discussion Questions:
1. A Type I error is like finding an innocent defendant guilty, and a Type II error is like finding a guilty defendant not guilty. Do you agree? Explain your answer with the help of at least three examples.
Explain why it is not possible to eliminate both Type I and Type II errors. Illustrate your explanation with at least three examples from your day-to-day life.
2. Several different procedures are used to test the hypotheses about the means of two samples. What information would you need to decide which procedure to use in a particular case? In each case, explain how the information would affect the choice of a procedure. Use at least two examples to explain your answers.
Assignments :
1. Police Officers’ Salaries
You are a city manager whose responsibilities include negotiating an employment contract with 71 police officers. The data provided includes the current salaries of these police officers.
The officers and you agree that the average annual salary of a police officer in comparable towns and cities is $46,000.
A newspaper recently published a report stating the salaries of these 71 police officers and that the police officers in your town were underpaid as compared to police officers in similar towns and cities. The newspaper approaches you to seek your response on the report.