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STATISTICS FOR BUSINESS
LIST OF READING MATERIALS
Title
1. Job Applications
2. Managing Risk
3. Cutcraft Cutlery Corporation
4. Compensation for Faculty Members
5. Airline Satisfaction Survey
6. The Avocado
7. The Mountain States Potato Company
8. Edgartown Fisheries
9. Monitor Systems
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JOB APPLICATIONS
A business graduate very much wants to get a job in any one of the top 10 accounting firms.
Applying to any of these companies requires a lot of effort and paperwork and is therefore costly.
She estimates the cost of applying to each of the 10 companies and the probability of getting a job offer there. These data are tabulated below. The tabulation is in the decreasing order of cost.
1. If the graduate applies to
3. What is the probability that a P/E ratio is larger than 12 for each industry type?
4. If you were a risk-seeker, which industry type would you find more attractive? If you were a risk-avoider?
5. What can you tell this investment group about the expected payoff and risk for each industry type?
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0
0.1
0.2
0.3
Probability
-100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Return
INVESTMENT A (μ = $370, σ = $442.8)
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
Probability
-100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Return
INVESTMENT B (μ = $240, σ = $120.0)
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
Probability
-100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Return
INVESTMENT c (μ = $210, σ = $70.0)
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CUTCRAFT CUTLERY CORPORATION
Cutcraft is one of the world’s leading cutlery manufacturing firms. Its modern plant is nestled in the Great Smokey Mountains foothills of southwestern Virginia. In the late 1800s a group of craftsmen skilled in the art of knife making settled there and began the area’s tradition of fine cutlery. And at Cutcraft, this tradition continues today. In 1948 W. C. Grace and Sons, a large direct selling organization, and Cutcraft joined forces to sell the fine cutlery products. Today, Cutcraft is a dominant force in direct sales. Its knives are distributed by over 70,000 sales people worldwide. And at today’s current prices, Cutcraft has sold over
$400,000,000 worth of