Statistics For Business and Economics.

This is the 3rd EMEA edition of Statistics for Business and Economics. It is based on the 2nd EMEA edition and the 11th United States (US) edition. The US editions have a distinguished history and deservedly high reputation for clarity and soundness of approach, and we maintained the presentation style and readability of those editions in preparing the international edition. We have replaced many of the US-based exam-ples, case studies and exercises with equally interesting and appropriate ones sourced from a wider geographical base, particularly the UK, Ireland, continental Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. We have also streamlined the book by moving four non-mandatory chapters, the software section, and exercise answers to the associated online platform. Other notable changes in this third EMEA edition are summarized here. Changes in the 3rd EMEA Edition • Software sections In the 2nd international edition, we have updated the soft-ware sections to provide step-by-step instructions for the latest versions of the software packages: Minitab 15, PASW 17 and Microsoft® Office EXCEL 2007. The software sections have been relocated at the end of chapters, as in the US editions. • Self-test exercises Certain exercises are identified as self-test exercises. Com-pletely worked-out solutions for those exercises are provided on the online platform that accompanies the text. Students can attempt the self-test exercises and immediately check the solution to evaluate their understanding of the con-cepts presented in the chapter. • Other Content Revisions The following additional content revisions appear in the new edition. o New examples of times series data are provided in Chapter 1. o Chapter 9 contains a revised introduction to hypothesis testing, with a better set of guidelines for identifying the null and alternative hypothe-ses. o Chapter 13 makes much more explicit, the linkage between Analysis of Variance and experimental design. o Chapter 17 now includes coverage of the popular Holt’s linear expo-nential smoothing methodology. o The treatment of non-parametric methods in Chapter 18 has been re-vised and updated. o Chapter 19 on index numbers(on the online platform) has been up-dated with current index numbers. o A number of case problems have been added or updated. These are in the chapters on Descriptive Statistics, Discrete Probability Distribu-tions, Inferences about Population Variances, Tests of Goodness of Fit and Independence, Simple Linear Regression, Multiple Regression, Regression Analysis:Model Building, Non-Parametric Methods, Index Numbers and Decision Analysis. These case problems provide students with the opportunity to analyze somewhat larger data sets and prepare managerial reports based on the results of the analysis. o Each chapter begins with a Statistics in Practice article that describes an application of the statistical methodology to be covered in the chap-ter. New to this edition are Statistics in Practice articles for Chapters 2, 9, 10 and 11, with several other articles substantially updated and re-vised for this new edition. o New examples and exercises have been added throughout the book, based on real data and recent reference sources of statistical informa-tion. We believe that the use of real data helps generate more student interest in the material and enables the student to learn about both the statistical methodology and its application. o To accompany the new exercises and examples, data files are available on the online platform. The data sets are available in Minitab, SPSS and EXCEL formats. Data set logos are used in the text to identify the data sets that are available on the online platform. Data sets for all case problems as well as data sets for larger exercises are included.