Description
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
