UNSW School of Economics , ECON1203 Business and Economic Statistics (Major project: Call of the Furniture Store )
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project_description.pdf
UNSW School of Economics
ECON1203 Business and Economic Statistics
Session 1, 2017
Major project: Call of the Furniture Store
Purpose
The idea is of this assignment is to simulate a professional work task involving statistical analysis. It is designed to help students learn about what is involved in undertaking basic statistical analysis to understand a real‐world problem, and communicating the results of this analysis to business stakeholders.
Context and Problem
You are working as a consultant for Big 4 Consultants Australia (“B4CA”), a Sydney‐based company that specializes in providing statistical consulting services to Australian companies seeking intelligence about their present or potential customers. Your company is contacted by Wooden Furniture Inc. (hereinafter called “Store”) an owner of several furniture stores in Sydney. It sells two types of furniture, wooden and medium density fibreboard (MDF). You are told that the CEO of the company, Jonathan Lee, is interested in using market research to make informed expansion decisions (i.e., decisions about what to stock, who to target and how to market etc.).
You attend a breakfast meeting with Mr. Lee and a senior B4CA consultant to discuss his concerns in more detail. At the meeting, Mr. Lee says:
“So the situation is that we hired a market‐research firm to come in and run an intercept survey (intercept survey: a survey of shoppers leaving a store) for us, which they did, and the data were collected in a single week in December 2016. I’m now looking for someone with statistical expertise to analyse the data and give us some recommendations.
The purpose of the survey was twofold: the first objective was to help us understand our customers, such as:
1. the profile of our customers (e.g. age, gender, disposable income, last renovation etc.); 2. our customers spending habits (e.g. what they purchased?, material of the furniture, number of
items etc.); 3. how they found out about us; and 4. the proportion of their furnishing budget dedicated to our store purchase.
The second objective was focused on how we can improve our business and expansion opportunities; thus we gathered data on:
1. our customer satisfaction; 2. what they wanted to see more of and what.
We hope that this will provide us with a better idea of what might do well in the store and inform expansion decision e.g. what type of customers are purchasing the different types of wood products (e.g. who is
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buying Wood and MDF?) as these products have different profit margins. In short, we need someone to help us crunch the numbers and provide us with a summary of findings from the survey.
The next part of the project is focused on gaining specific insights about our business. In particular, I am looking for the following:
Based on casual observation, my sense is that our biggest shopper segment is established adults above 40 with a significant amounts of annual disposable incomes i.e. with disposable incomes between $80,001 and $100,000 per year. Can you establish whether this conjecture is true?
Did the majority of our customers purchase wood products rather than MDF? More precisely, does wood make up more than 50% of our total sales?
Of the customers who purchased wooden products, do they spend more than those who purchase MDF products.
We’re also interested in examining ways on how we can expand our sales e.g. what furniture and furniture type should I be making more of (i.e. wood or mdf)? What advertising media should I be using? Anything you can tell me about how to improve our appeal to our main shopper types would be great!” Based on these comments, you and your partner draw up a consulting brief, which you send to Mr. Lee. He approves it and hires you and your partner to perform the analysis required to address his concerns. Mr. Lee then sends you an Excel file containing the data from the intercept survey. You and your partner are given the responsibility of providing a statistical analysis of this data and for producing an associated report that addresses Mr. Lee’s concerns.
Report
It is natural to associate different parts of the project work with the coverage of relevant material in particular Sharpe chapters and lectures. However, remember you are writing a professional report, not providing a sequence of answers to assignment problems. Thus, you and your partner should try to write a flowing report organized around ideas, not methods.
The report should include a brief Executive Summary. Mr. Lee, your audience, is an intelligent person but he is not a statistician. The Executive Summary needs to be non‐technical so that he can assess what you and your partner have done and understand your basic conclusions. Your colleague at B4CA is familiar with technical analysis, and will be reviewing the report before it is sent out to the client to ensure that the conclusions discussed in the Executive Summary are reasonable and based on sound statistical analysis.
You can see from the marking rubric below that while your project mark will be based primarily on the substance of your statistical work, the presentation of the material will also be considered. Reports should be typed and should use appropriate graphical techniques to represent the data, as well as other appropriate statistical analysis. For some guidance on what or how these types of reports might look like, please check the “Project” section of Moodle where some actual examples of statistical reports are posted.
As is the case in any actual work environment, there is no “one right way” to construct a report like this, and hence there is no rigid template for what your project should look like, nor is there only one way to approach the analysis.
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Data
Each student will be assigned a personalized data set. Each individual data set refers to the problem above and has the same structure. However, values of some of the key variables will vary across students, meaning that statistical results and any inferences drawn from them may differ across students. Since this is a pairwise project, please download only one set of data using any one of your zIDs.
In the “Project” folder on Moodle, you will find an Excel file that you and your partner will download in order to obtain your personalized data set. Once you enter your zID into the highlighted cell in the Excel worksheet, a personalized data set will be generated. Copy and paste the generated data into a new Excel workbook, where you two will conduct your analysis. Each data set contains a sample of 293 observations, where each observation refers to a separate survey response. There are 14 variables, and they are as follows:
Variable Description
pid Survey response identifier
FType Main types of furniture purchased by the respondent from the Store 1 = Storages 2= Entertainment 3 = Dining Tables 4 = Dining Chairs 5 = Indoor Benches 6 = Sofa and Deep Seaters 7 = Occasional Tables 8 = Desks 9 = Outdoor Set
marketing How the respondent heard about the Store: 1 = Web search 2 = Store visit 3 = Word of mouth 4 = Store Website 5 = Social media 6 = Junk mail 7 = Other
budget Respondent’s estimate of his/her budget for furnishing
spend Amount spent in the ‘Store’
age Respondent’s age
Dinc Total disposable income of the respondent, where: 1 = up to $20,000 per year; 2 = $20,001‐$40,000 per year; 3 = $40,001‐$60,000 per year; 4 = $60,001‐$80,000 per year; 5 = $80,001‐$100,000 per year; 6 = $100,001 or more per year.
lastreno Number of years (rounded to nearest year) since the respondent completed the last renovation of his/her home
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lastrenospend Amount spent by the respondent on their last renovation
wood Number of wood items purchased by the respondent from the Store
MDF Number of MDF items purchased from the Store
gender Gender of the respondent where: 1=male 0=female
csat Respondent’s satisfaction of his/her purchase. 1 = very unhappy 2 = unhappy 3 = neutral 4 = happy 5 = very happy
PFType Potential furniture types. This describes the main type of furniture the respondent would like to see more of: 0 = Nothing 1 = Storages 2 = Entertainment 3 = Dining Tables 4 = Dining Chairs 5 = Indoor Benches 6 = Sofa and Deep Seaters 7 = Occasional Tables 8 = Desks 9 = Outdoor Set
Tutorial work
You and your partner should think about the problem and plan what needs to be done before you actually start undertaking extensive computing work. In order to assist in this process, there will be some project discussion time in tutorials. In particular, in your Week 7 tutorial you and your partner will be asked to review the problem and to discuss with other students what is required by way of analysis. You should generate your data, and then copy, paste, and save it into a new Excel workbook that you bring along to class as part of your preparation for your Week 7 tutorial. In this Excel workbook, you and your partner should take time before class to generate some descriptive statistics for your data that both of you can show your tutor in Week 7. This will confirm that the both of you have correctly created your data set and that you and your partner are ready to commence your analysis. These descriptive statistics will also be required to answer a Week 7 tutorial question.
In your Week 9 tutorial, time will be devoted to monitoring your progress and discussing how more recently covered material might be relevant to the project tasks. Naturally the both of you should consult your tutor or lecturer should any of you have any other questions regarding the project.
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Details Length: No longer than 1500 words, excluding tables and graphs. Total length including all
discussion, tables and graphs should not exceed 12 pages. Cover sheet: Attach the Project Assessment sheet (given below) as your first page. Check that
you have completed the top (grey) sections in full, including your signatures. Do not use plastic sheets or binders. Simply attach the completed cover sheet and staple the pages together.
Project mark: The project will be marked out of 20, and will constitute 20% of your total course mark.
Due date: Only one hard copy of your assignment for you and your partner is to be submitted to your tutor in or before your scheduled tutorial in week 11 (beginning May 15). In addition to the hard copy, you must also submit one electronic copy (for both you and your partner) to the course website by 6 pm on Friday May 19. Upload your assignment via the Turnitin link on the course website. Browse and upload a copy of your document (only one for the both of you) ‐ do not paste text. Use both of your student zIDs in the file name (e.g., z1234567&z2345678.doc).
Late submission: 20% of the value of the project will be deducted for every day or part thereof that the hard copy is turned in after the start time of your Week 11 tutorial (including the weekend). Projects submitted more than five days late will not be marked and will be assigned a mark of zero. You and your partner can and should be working on the material regularly before the due date. Extensions will only be granted in exceptional circumstances and must be approved by the lecturer‐in‐charge. For more details about late submission, see the Course Outline.
Plagiarism: All assignments will be checked for plagiarism on the Turnitin software into which they are uploaded. Therefore, you and your partner must submit the soft copy via Turnitin only once. Please refer to “Due Date” above for detail. The software will automatically check against all other projects ever submitted. Material copied from previous projects will be found and the source will be identified. Evidence of plagiarism will be treated extremely seriously: automatic and immediate failure in the course is a possible penalty. See Part B of the course outline for further details about UNSW’s policies on plagiarism. If you are in doubt about how to identify or avoid plagiarism, follow the link to and complete the self‐paced Working with Academic Integrity module on Moodle.
Coverage: In your work for this project, you are only expected to use the statistical techniques developed in the text and lectures up until the end of week 9.
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ECON1203 Business and Economic Statistics PROJECT ASSESSMENT
Name ___________________________________________ zID __________________ (Member 1) Name ___________________________________________ zID __________________ (Member 2) Workshop Group (Tutor, Time and Place) ____________________________________ (Member 1) Workshop Group (Tutor, Time and Place) ____________________________________ (Member 2) We declare that this assessment item is our own work except where acknowledged, and acknowledge that the assessor of this item may, for the purpose of assessing this item: (1) Reproduce this assessment item and provide a copy to another member of the University; and/or (2) Communicate a copy of this assessment item to a plagiarism checking service (which may then retain a copy of the assessment item on its database for the purpose of future plagiarism checking) We certify that we have read and understood the University Rules in respect of Student Academic Misconduct. Signed ______________________________________ Date _____________________ (Member 1) Signed ______________________________________ Date _____________________ (Member 2)
ANALYSIS and DISCUSSION (14 marks) Characterizing key features of the data (7 marks) Missing ( ) Poor ( ) Adequate ( ) Good ( ) Excellent ( ) Motivation, production and evaluation of hypotheses (3 marks) Missing ( ) Poor ( ) Adequate ( ) Good ( ) Excellent ( ) Justification of main conclusions (2 marks) Missing ( ) Poor ( ) Adequate ( ) Good ( ) Excellent ( ) Executive summary (2 marks) Missing ( ) Poor ( ) Adequate ( ) Good ( ) Excellent ( )
MECHANICS (6 marks) Presentation (3 marks) Poor ( ) Adequate ( ) Good ( ) Excellent ( ) Use of graphics (3 marks) Missing ( ) Poor ( ) Adequate ( ) Good ( ) Excellent ( ) Other Some problems with spelling ( ) Poor spelling ( ) Some problems with grammar ( ) Poor grammar ( ) Some confused or off‐target discussion and interpretations ( ) Well argued ( ) Too long (you need to condense your argument) ( )
GENERAL COMMENTS
