Experimental Design With Applications in Management, Engineering and the Sciences

摘要

The authors indicate that the key objective of this book is to provide an intuitive understanding of the principles of experimental design with minimal mathematical detail. Other distinguishing characteristics of this book include its emphasis on management applications, numerically simple examples, and the illustrative use of output from several commonly used statistical software packages. I applaud the inclusion of the software output as well as the availability of data files for the examples, which can be downloaded from an Internet site. Curiously, although individual software packages are named when their output is displayed, specific version numbers and software company names are not provided. The first half of the book is devoted to one-factor designs, multiple comparisons, two-factor designs, nested designs, and Latin squares. The next third of the book covers factorials and fractional factorials, including a thorough chapter on Taguchi methods. This leaves little space for all of the remaining material, comprising a brief chapter on response surface methods and a chapter listing some recommended literature references for topics not covered. Berger and Maurer are justifiably proud of the book's strong emphasis on management (and marketing) applications that are not commonly found in other experimental design textbooks. Examples pertain to customer satisfaction at a pediatric clinic, shelf space allocation in a supermarket, pricing strategies, and factors influencing seat belt use, to name a few. Given the title, I expected to also encounter applications pertinent to engineering and the sciences and was disappointed to find that these were very scarce throughout the first three-quarters of the book, with a study on battery lifetime in various devices the lone example with a study on battery lifetime in various devices the lone example with a "hard" science flavor. Near the end of the book, in the sections on Taguchi and response surface designs, more examples relevant to these fields were given.