Statistics for Decision Making

My name is Bahram Adrangi, and I teach BADM 700 Statistics for Decision Making. I have been teaching a variety of statistics, econometrics, and forecasting classes for over thirty years. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to class, and hope that this will be a productive and enjoyable learning experience for all of you. I also want to say a few words about statistics and its uses and applications in life.

I am aware that statistics is often viewed as the bogeyman of most schools of business. I try in my classes, online and on ground, to dispel that image. Statistics has also been confused with probability theory, drenched in combinatorial arithmetic that students suffer through and forget about after finals. I must say that I have been able to dispel that one too. While statistics is imbedded in probabilities, it is more than esoteric probability problems. Furthermore, I cannot remember a single student of mine from schools of business who pursued a career in actuaries.

In my years in academia, which has coverd my entire professional career, I have applied some form of statistics or econometrics in my academic research, forecasting, and limited consulting. I hope I can bring my years of experience to this course. Ultimately, I hope that some of you will put these skills to immediate use. We will cover data analysis, graphing, descriptive statistics, making inferences from samples about populations, and see applications of regression analysis in almost all fields of business, from management to production and finance. Furthermore, our course constitutes a strong foundation for some to continue and be certified as quality control engineers. I have had a few students, undergraduate and MBAs, who pursued that path very successfully. I am excited to work with UNR EMBAs for the first time and hope that the excitement will be mutual.

 

Bahram Adrangi is professor of economics at the Robert B. Pamplin School of Business Administration, University of Portland. He received his BS in economics in 1973, his MBA in 1975; and a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon in 1982. His areas of research interest are financial economics, transportation economics and international economics. His published papers have appeared in the Journal of Futures Market, Financial Review, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Applied Financial Economics, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, Transportation Journal, The Logistics and Transportation Review, and Journal of Industrial Organization, among others. He is also a regular presenter at economics and finance conferences nationally and internationally.