> It is time for most of us to review textbooks for the next Fall. I was
> wondering if anyone has a favorite text for the introductory business
> statistics course. Currently, I use _Mason and Lind_ and this book is
> adequate. Any suggestions will be welcome.
Let me stress that to a good extent I am making this suggestion
blindly and it may well be worth what you are paying for it, but:
By far the book that I have liked the best is Gary Smith's intro
book. Smith I believe is an econ prof at Pomona College, and the book
unlike any other statistics book I have read emphasizes the "intuition"
behind statistics, with colorful examples. When I say "intuition" I
don't mean tehnical things like knowing that standard errors decrease as
sqrt(n) goes up (although of course the book covers those topics), but
rather "practical" things like sample bias, correlation not being
causality, the importance of standard errors, type I vs type II errors,
etc. That is, it corrects a lot of the misperceptions and myths that
non-statistically-trained laypeople have.
BUT: I have never actually used the book in a course (because I
don't teach statistics or econometrics). And it is not a business
statistics book; it's meant to be a general purpose statistics book but
with a special eye towards econ students. So I don't really know how
appropriate it would be for your business students.
--Mike Tamada
Occidental College
tamada@oxy.edu