This short case describes a famous experiment conducted by Sir Ronald A. Fisher and colleagues to test Dr. B. Muriel Bristol's claim that she could tell "only by tasting" whether milk or tea was poured first into her cup. Using hypothesis testing, students must answer the question of how many...

Cowan and Associates (C&A) provided strategic planning, business planning, change management, performance measurement, and knowledge management support to various Navy commands. Its managing director, Jeff Pottinger, was contemplating a Request for Proposal to provide change management support...

Individuals' judgement of probabilities—the likelihood of different events to occur, or the attribution of likely causes to what has occurred—is plagued by numerous biases and errors. This note focuses on Bayesian updating and the base rate neglect, and also provides a brief overview of...

This note supports cases used in Darden's "Marketing Analytics" course elective. Marketing analytics powered by "big data" holds the promise to transform marketing strategy from a discipline based mostly on intuition to a fact-based decision-making process. Based on interactions with more than...

Managers must understand their marketing efforts as precisely as possible in order to determine how much to spend on each marketing channel. This technical note explores marketing analytics—the process of systematically using empirical data about customers, companies, and industry context to...

This case allows instructors to lay out the challenges of providing universal access to safe drinking water in some developing and emerging countries—one of the current UN development goals. The challenge across developing countries is to find long-lasting and sustainable solutions, and to...

According to PETWORLD financials, the year 2012 had seen a dip in sales, fewer people coming into its stores, and comparable store sales that were weaker than expected. Competition in the pet-care market was increasingly fierce with a variety of players, big and small, fighting for market share....

Arcadia Medical Center's newly appointed medical director of operations for the department of emergency medicine has noticed a gradual increase in the length of time it takes for patients to be seen and their care completed. He frequently examines patients who are waiting in their stretchers in...

Assessing the performance of private equity (PE) investments is a challenging task. It starts with the fact that the assets are privately held and illiquid. By contrast, public equity valuations are determined in a vast open market populated largely by disinterested investors acting on publicly...

John Mangum is a partner in Longview Services (Longview), an engineering consulting firm he began with his friend and former coworker, Frank Edmonds. The firm has seen steady growth over the past few years, but a key contract recently fell through. Now, Longview is considering pursuing a new...