Electra Wants to Purchase a Laptop for Use in Her

question 57

Essay

Electra wants to purchase a laptop for use in her MBA program so she can work on assignments and surf the web while the professor drones on endlessly. After consulting with her colleagues, she chooses the dimensions of cost, weight, processor speed, and touchscreen capability as critical to her long term success and amusement. She evaluates four different laptops and rates their performance on each criterion on a scale from 1 (poor)to 5 (excellent). She is struggling with her assessment of the importance of the Cost criterion. As an avid lottery player, she is pretty sure that tonight's drawing will result in at least a two number match on the ticket she bought on the way to class and it could mean a three-number match. Given her uncertainty, she would like to choose the laptop that performs the best overall across the entire spectrum of possibilities of the outcome of tonight's lottery. Which would you recommend?
$$\begin{array} { | l | l | l | l | l | l | } \hline \text { Dimension } & \text { Importance } & \text { Sir Face } & \text { Toybook Air } & \text { Knockoff } & \text { High Priced } \\\hline \text { Weight } & 3 & 4 & 4 & 3 & 5 \\\hline \text { Speed } & 5 & 4 & 4 & 4 & 3 \\\hline \text { Cost } & ? ? & 2 & 4 & 5 & 1 \\\hline \text { Touchscreen } & 1 & 5 & 2 & 3 & 3 \\\hline\end{array}$$

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Definitions:

Level of Significance

The threshold under which a statistical result is considered statistically significant, traditionally set at 0.05 or 5%.

Degrees of Freedom

The number of independent values or quantities which can be assigned to a statistical distribution or parameter estimate, impacting the shape and scale of the distribution.

Rule of 5

An empirical rule suggesting that a sample of size five is often sufficient for capturing the median of a population, specifically under conditions reflected in the five-number summary.

Independent Events

Two or more events whose occurrence or outcome does not affect one another.