Case 1: BeyondTheRack (40 Marks)
BeyondTheRack (BTR), a division of UK Clothing Group, is a British chain of women’s apparel
stores operating across the United Kingdom.
The chain recently ran a promotion in which discount coupons were sent to customers of other
UK Clothing Group stores. Data collected for a sample of 100 in-store credit card transactions
at BTR stores during one day while the promotion was running are contained in the file named
BTR.xls.
The proprietary card method of payment refers to charges made using a UK Clothing Group
charge card. Customers who made a purchase using a discount coupon are referred to as
promotional customers and customers who made a purchase but did not use a discount coupon
are referred to as regular customers. Because the promotional coupons were not sent to regular
BTR stores customers, management considers the sales made to people presenting the
promotional coupons as sales it would not otherwise make. Of course, BTR also hopes that the
promotional customers will continue to shop at its stores. Most of the variables shown in the
file BTR.xls are self-explanatory, but two of the variables require some clarification:
Items: The total number of items purchased
Net Sales: The total amount ($) charged to the credit card
BTR’s management would like to use this sample data to learn about its customer’s base and to
evaluate the promotion involving discount coupons.
Required:

Use the tabular and graphical methods of descriptive statistics to help management develop a
customer profile and to evaluate the promotional campaign.
You should provide the following:
a) Relative frequency distributions for the key variables;# of Items, Net sales, Method of
Payment, Gender, Marital Status & Age (Tables & Appropriate charts). Also add the
appropriate numerical descriptive statistics values.
b) A frequency distribution and appropriate chart(s) of the type of customer versus method
of payment.
c) The appropriate chart to explore the relationship between net sales and customer age.
**For each of the following requirements, add comments about the findings
Notes:
• Organization: Your assignment must be well-organized. Students have lost marks
in the past when we were not able to find questions or certain parts of questions.
Case 2: MoneyBall (15 Marks)
Over the Christmas holiday, a stats professor, Dr. Bright, was enjoying some well-deserved rest
once the marking, from the previous semester’s courses, had been completed. With the snow
piled high and the thermometer plummeting, he decided to stay cozy and catch up on a number
of films that he hadn’t seen in a long time. One of the films on his list was Moneyball, the story
of how Billy Beane turned the baseball world on its head by introducing, wait for it – objective
statistical analysis. This was baseball heresy and the ‘traditional’ baseball world was salivating
at the thought of the monumental catastrophe awaiting Billy and the Oakland A’s.
Seeing as the film was both immensely entertaining and filled with the fun and practical
implementation of stats (has a better movie ever been made?), he decided to research the
validity of the claims made in the film regarding the # of wins, the size of a team’s payroll and
the impact of playing Moneyball. In the movie, a Yale economics grad Peter Brand (in real life it
was actually Paul DePodesta – he didn’t want his real name used in the film, and he actually
went to Harvard, not Yale) spent countless hours examining reams of data about the OBA (on
base average i.e percentage) of thousands of professional baseball players in both the major
and minor leagues.

After being highly entertained, Dr Bright went and looked at the data since the 2002 season (the
season in which the film took place) and discovered the following:
42% of teams now use the Moneyball approach. The league can be divided into 2 classes of
teams – the rich ($100+ Million in annual payroll) and the poor (?) with smaller payrolls (the
smallest being the Houston Astros at just over $24M, in 2013). 74% of the teams using the
Moneyball strategy are ‘poor’, whereas 74% of the teams not using the Moneyball strategy are
rich.
a) What percentage of teams have payrolls below $100M?
b) If you randomly select a team from amongst the ‘poor’ what is the probability it
employs the Moneyball strategy?
c) If you randomly select from the set of ‘rich teams’ what is the probability it employs
the Moneyball strategy?
d) What is the probability that either a team plays Moneyball and has a payroll below
$100M, or is rich and doesn’t play Moneyball?
Case 3: Geography and Education (15 Marks)
A firm selling products geared to those with higher education hired a demographer to tell them
more about geographical location and education achievement. The demographer provided the
firm with the following joint probabilities.
Education Maritimes Quebec Ontario Man/Sask Alta/BC
Less the
secondary
school diploma
.008 .031 .030 .021 .019
Secondary
diploma
.042 .072 .108 .059 .043
Some postsecondary
schooling
.008 .032 .021 .016 .019
Undergraduate
degree
.032 .059 .152 .038 .080
Post-graduate
degree
.010 .018 .031 .008 .043
Required:
a) What is the probability that someone living in Ontario has an undergraduate degree?
b) What is the probability that someone is living in Alberta or British Columbia?
c) What is the probability that someone living in the Maritimes does not have a secondary
school diploma?
d) What is the probability that someone living in Quebec has a University degree?
e) What is the probability that someone living west of the Ottawa River (Ontario, Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia) has a post-graduate degree? Compare that
to the probability for someone living east of the Ottawa River (Quebec and Maritimes)
having a post-graduate degree?