Purpose of Assignment 

To locate, retrieve, and evaluate the effects of macroeconomic indicators on your own decision making. 

Assignment Steps 

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional tutorials via the web offering support for Office products. 

Scenario: Consider your last big purchase such as a car, appliances, home repairs, home purchase, computer equipment, college tuition, or another “big-ticket” item, which are often purchased using loans/financing (by borrowing money). Also consider your decision-making process that led you to choose a particular make, model, or brand of the product (or service) you purchased and whether it was the right time to make the purchase given economic conditions at the time of your purchase. While analyzing your decision, keep in mind everything from interest rates to the prices of complementary and substitute goods are driven by human economic behavior. 

Develop a minimum 1,050-word analysis of your decision-making process in which you include the following:

• Retrieve statistics on Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and on Real Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) by year for the last ten years. You can retrieve those statistics from internet sources including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’s FRED web site, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) web site, or another credible source of your choice. Post these statistics in a single worksheet of an Excel® workbook and submit your Excel® file with your report. In your report, discuss the latest 10-year trends in both GDP and PCE. Also discuss how the trends in GDP compare with trends in PCE. You are encouraged to include graphs of these statistics in your report; you could create the graphs in Excel®and copy them into your report.
• Retrieve statistics on the Effective Federal Funds Rate and on the Consumer Price Index: All Items Less Food and Energy by year for the last 30 years. You can retrieve those statistics from internet sources including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’s FRED web site, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) web site, or other credible sources of your choice. Post these statistics in a single worksheet of an Excel® workbook and submit your Excel® file with your report. In your report, discuss how the trends in the Effective Federal Funds Rate compare with trends in inflation. If you took out a loan to pay for your “big-ticket” purchase, what was the interest rate on your loan? Were interest rates rising or falling at that time?  Were interest rates relatively high or low at that time? You are also encouraged to include graphs of these statistics in your report.
• Discuss the influence of any Federal government or state government programs, such as tax credits or tax deductions for energy-saving/efficiency purchases, on your decision to make your last big purchase; or if government incentives did not factor into your decision, explain why not.
• Develop conclusions about the economy’s influence on personal and business decision-making relative to purchases of big-ticket items, investments, or other major purchases. 

Cite a minimum of three peer-reviewed sources. Note: The Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics can be cited to fulfill this requirement. 

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines. 

Click the Assignment Files tab to submit your assignment. Be sure you submit your paper as well as the two required Excel® files

BA325 Excel

Instructions:

After you download the Excel Analysis Data file associated with this assignment, please look through the data, and then respond to the following questions that are used to assess your Information Literacy skills. This assignment asks you to think about when analysis tools like Charts, Filter & Sort, and PivotTables are useful for business decisions.

Erica Wagner, your boss, sends you this Excel file and gives you the following information. She says she wants your analysis when she returns from a conference next week.

“Once you organize this data set. I need you to analyze the 18-19 academic year (summer, fall, winter, spring) enrollment by course and term. I am giving a presentation to the new Provost in an attempt to convince her to invest more money in the undergraduate business program because we are growing both online and on campus. I think the following stats will be convincing:

• Popularity of our undergraduate classes (numbers 100-499, please exclude 400-410 course numbers)
  • By concentration and BA core
  • Fill rate and total enrollment
• What term/meeting day is the most popular and which is the least?
  • Fill rate and total enrollment
• What is the ratio of ground campus classes versus online courses?
  • By concentration and BA core

While you are running these calculations, see what else you can interpret from the data that should also be included in my talk.

Tell me what the data is of so I know your not a bot

Advertising is one of the most common forms of visual persuasion we encounter in everyday life. The influence of advertising in our society is persuasive and subtle. Part of its power comes from our habit of internalizing the intended messages of words and images without thinking deeply about them. Once we begin decoding the ways in which advertisements are constructed, once we view them critically, we can understand how, or if, they work as arguments. We may then make better decisions about whether to buy products and what factors convinced us or failed to convince us. 

What are the different forms of advertising?

Modern media comes in many different formats, including print media (books, magazines, newspapers), television, movies, video games, music, cell phones, various kinds of software, and the Internet. Each type of media involves both content and also a device or object through which that content is delivered.

TEAM TASK: 

As a team you are going to Review Chapter 4: Visual Rhetoric:  Thinking About Images as Arguments. You will be assigned a Section of the Chapter (written, visual, unfit, political, caricature, photography-maps graphs charts ) and as a Team you willResearch the content of that Chapter Area (you will see topic page overlap )   and implement the following:  You will look at and interpret a media campaign or advertisement. Focus on social or ethical aspects  * Seek to find one or more of the FALLACY TYPES identified Chapter 9 pages 363- 380. Include this information in your findings.  Consider and incorporate as many of the following 16 categories :

1. The objectives:                                        What role does the ad play in the economy?
2. The audience:               Is it targeted to a group that could be considered vulnerable?
3. Effectiveness:                           Does it promote something that is socially desirable?
4. Role in marketing mix:                            What role does the ad play in the economy?
5. Image, product differentiation and branding:                             Is the ad misleading?  
6. Other promotion factors
7. The unique selling proposition.
8. The basis for the appeal(s).
9.  How would you make improvements?
10. The creative philosophy 
11. The slogan
12. Secondary or supporting points or claims 
13. The tone or mood and manner:                                                Is the ad misleading?                                                                                             
14. Type of presenter 
15. The motivational appeal:          Does it promote something that is socially desirable?
16. Executional style 
17.   

• Each TEAM will develop a 15 minute class presentation about their researched area. You have options to use power points, maps, videos, and other resources that will help educate your audience about your research.
• Your Presentation should include:

1. A Power Point, the media piece or some type of visual presentation~~
2. A Question and Answer {Q & A} & Interactive session, quiz, role play, etc …

Respond to 2 peers. Include at least 2 outside sources in your postings for full credit. 

Larry Fowler

 1.  Annika wants to implement a customer service test for her store. You compared two and found the following validity correlation coefficients: Test 1=.15, Test 2=.75. Annika prefers Test 1. Why do you recommend Test 2 over Test 1? 

Test 2 has a different validity correlation coefficient than Test 1. However these tests have different factors and results based on these results going forward.  Test 2 also gives a different option than the option Test 1.  Test 1 has a different possible outcome based on these results.  Technology has also given rise to  more available data on individuals and new tools that enable organizations to mine these data for competitive advantage (Pulakos & Kantrowitz, 2016).  

       Customer service is important because companies look to retain customers and learn about their needs and exceed their needs.  Customer service reviews also factor into both Tests as this company looks to evaluate to where they can improve the customer service experience.  

Zakkiyya Kelly

2. After implementing the customer service test, you found it results in disparate impact in gender. When would it be acceptable to use a measure that predicts job success, but that results in adverse impact?

Disparate impact in gender, or gender discrimination is not acceptable or condoned within the workplace and should never be acceptable. The only reason I could think of for when it would be, is to perhaps compare qualitative and quantitative statistics of job success between the company’s male and female employees, or to perhaps compare job retainability statistics between the two genders. It is against employment laws and EOC laws and policies to discriminate in employment. Gender discrimination may exist in various dimensions which include hiring discrimination, differences in salary and wages, discrimination/differences in promotion and inequity related to different goods and facilities provided to different gender (Abbas, 2011). Gender discrimination affect on employee productivity at a 95% confidence level which explained strong association between gender discrimination and employee productivity (Abbas, 2011).

For any business to predict the job success of an employee, this may present more difficult, as human behavior is something that may be observed, but predictions may be unforeseeable. Burnout, work stressors, work conflict, unhappiness in the job (over time), and work/home imbalances may affect an employee’s performance over time, or they could remain enthusiastic and productive during the remainder of their time on the job. The validity coefficient is a number between 0 and +1 that indicates the magnitude of the relationship between a predictor (such as test scores) and the criterion (such as a measure of actual job success) (Phillips, 2020, p.319). The validity coefficient is the absolute value of the correlation between the predictor and the criterion (Phillips, 2020, p.319). Because jobs and people are complex, a single measure can never fully predict what a person’s job performance will be because success on the job depends on so many factors. Therefore, validity coefficients rarely exceed .40 in staffing contexts (Phillips, 2020, p.319).  Several factors which could affect job success may include: Following the rules; Being courteous; Being a team player; Finding a mentor; Fitting in the with organization’s culture; Conquering negativity; and Finding a work-life balance (Goodwill Community Foundation, Inc., 2021).

Please respond to one of the following, using the resources from this week’s Learn and those below as the basis of your response:

Option 1:

• Choose one painting by a late 20th century African American artist: Bearden, Lawrence, Basquiat, or Colescott.
• Describe specific elements of the works from the chosen artists that represent the multiplicity of the African American experience.
• Identify one by an African American artist that you would like in your home or workplace, and explain why.

Option 2:

• Choose one example of architecture that you believe best exemplifies the characteristic post-modern style.
• Provide specific elements as rationale for your selection.

Describe two of the features of postmodern style that you find intriguing.

Option 3:

• Activism!  The 60’s and 70’s were hotbeds of activism.  Name one group that fought for its rights during that period and one event that best represents their success or failure.

Option 4:

• In this document, you will find a musical tour of America between the end of the 50’s and the antiseptic motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando’s movie to the very different breed and period depicted in Peter Fonda’s masterpiece, Easy Rider,  As someone who lived through it, I see a far better America, back then, with much better music.  What do the changes we see in music and its impact on culture in the 60’s and 70’s say about America?  Would you let your sister date a Rolling Stone?Beatles or Stones.docx