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. 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 emphasises 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,
auto-correlation and remedies, indicator variables to represent segment
differences, and seasonality, structural shifts or shocks in time series
models. Special applications in market segmentation and portfolio
analysis are offered, and an introduction to conjoint analysis is
included. Nonlinear models are motivated with arguments of diminishing
or increasing marginal response.
