Activity I – A manager claims that increases in advertising expenditure will surely raise the firm's profits, citing his sense that people find the firm's ads entertaining. 

1: Sketch how you might refute this claim using:

a: A theoretical argument

b: Data

2: Why might the refutation using data be more convincing?

Activity II – A grocery store manager is interested in the data-generating process for her store's weekly soda sales. She believes factors impacting these sales include price, product placement, and whether the week contains a holiday. Write out a formal representation of the data-generation process for weekly soda sales that incorporates these and additional factors.

Activity III – Access the dataset Sales and Costs.xlsx (See the attached) and answer the following questions.

1: Calculate these descriptive statistics.

a: Mean of sales

b: Variance of materials costs

c: Covariance of labor e: costs and materials costs

d: Mean of labor costs

e: Total sales

2: Calculate at least two more descriptive statistics for this dataset.

Text book Title: Predictive Analytics for Business Strategy

Subtitle: Reasoning from Data to Actionable Knowledge

ISBN: 978-1-259-19151-0

Authors: Jeffrey T. Prince

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education

Publication Date: 2019