Objectives

Summarize the role of decision making in business.

Describe common biases in decision making.

Explain the roles of emotion and fairness in decision making.

Interpret reflective and expedient decision making.

Apply the standard of APA style to all research and writing tasks.

Apply principles of quantitative and qualitative research to business cases.

Apply critical thinking skills to analyze business situations.

Describe the opportunities provided by technology for businesses.

Appropriately use effective communication techniques.

Recognize situations that present potential ethical issues, and develop solutions for those issues.

Prepare to test the hypothesis (Step 8 of the Sekaran & Bougie process) using simulated data:

Search and identify the surveys, assessment tools or instruments you would consider to gather data on the variables identified. Explain how these surveys help you understand what your collected data should look like (range of expected values).

Find a random number generator and create simulated data for not more than 25 participants (test subjects) in the study using the ranges of values for the variables you established above.

Using the hypothesis testing methods presented in Sekaran and Bougie (2010), suggest a method that you believe would be most appropriate to test this hypothesis. Limit your choices of hypothesis testing to only one of three possibilities: graphical method, correlation or t-test. You may use the statistical functions in MS Excel for any of these three methods. Finally, explain the rationale for your selection. Why was this method selected when compared with the strengths and weaknesses of the other two methods?

Now that you have created notional (simulated) data to illustrate the hypothesis testing method, apply these data to the hypothesis testing method you selected. Based on the simulated data and your hypothesis testing method, indicate if the null hypothesis is accepted or rejected and why.

Based on your findings, comment on the potential implications of these findings as a potential contribution to the scholarly literature.