the Tread Master discussion
Q: You just saw a commercial for the Tread Master, an exercise machine that claims an average weight loss of 10 pounds. A commercial for the Climber, a competing product, claims that only 1 out of 10 users of the Tread Master lost any weight at all. The rest of them gained weight. How can both of these claims be true?
A: You often see these kind of discrepancies when it comes to competitors making claims. While both may be true, each company will pick and choose which statistic they want to promote in order to make themselves look better. The question at hand is how can two statements that are on opposite ends of the spectrum be true? One way this could happen is sampling. Sampling is a way of curating statistics when a population size is out of the question or cannot be gathered. The two companies could’ve used different sample sizes in different markets to collect their data. This can be the problem with sampling as our text book explains: “Samples are often used to obtain reliable estimates of population parameters… In the process, we make trade-offs between the time, money, and effort to collect the data and the error of estimating a population parameter.” (Lind, Marchal & Wathen, 2015).
Tread Master could’ve pulled a sample from active users or gym users in order to state that the average weight loss is 10 pounds. Climber could’ve used a sample from non-active users or those who have never had a gym membership, etc. In this situation, both samples are true, it just depends on what sample you choose to look at. Often times companies will choose to only look at data that helps them or hurts their competitor. Even if this is not the case here, which it might not be considering we do not have the data in front of us, sampling is a good example of how companies can use stats and be truthful at the same time.
Lind, D. A., Marchal, W. D., Whaten, S. A, (2015). Statistical Techniques in Business Economics Sixteenth Addition. Retrieved from: https://viewer.gcu.edu/3GRCN6
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