Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Problem of Business Forecasting: Papers Presented at the Eighty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, Washington, December 27-29, 1923
What is true of human conduct in general is true of conduct in business. When a man enters business, he enters a forecasting profession. He may forecast badly or well, but forecast he must. He may scorn business fore casters, but he cannot help being one. He may Shun sta tistics, but he cannot help using them. Since business is essentially risk-taking with the expectation of profits, every enterpriser must run risks; and, as a risk-taker, he is necessarily a business forecaster. That is to say, his decision to take a risk is based on predictions concerning the degree of the risk and the reward for taking it. He must decide when to make loans, when to buy cotton, when to build a factory, what styles of Shoes to manu facture, when to increase his output. In every case his decision to take one risk rather than another is influenced by his expectation concerning the future the trend of interest rates, the price of cotton next week, building costs next April, the demand for tanned shoes next spring, the output of competitors next year. Indeed, any enterpriser could fill an entire volume with the decisions he is forced to make in the ordinary course of business, and every one of them would involve forecasting on a statistical basis. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
