Saturday, February 6, 2016

Review of "Quantitative Methods: An Introduction for Business Management 1st Edition," by Paolo Brandimarte



Review of

Quantitative Methods: An Introduction for Business Management 1st Edition,by Paolo Brandimarte, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2011. 912 pp., $140.00 (hardbound). ISBN 978-0-470-49634-3.

 This is a math book with some business and economic examples included. A better subtitle and explanation would be “The math you need to know to use and understand advanced quantitative methods in business.” The book is split into sections and a look at the 16 chapter titles after the introductory first chapter will explain a great deal. They are:

*) Calculus
*) Linear algebra
*) Descriptive statistics
*) Probability theories
*) Discrete random variables
*) Continuous random variables
*) Dependence, correlation and conditional expectation
*) Inferential statistics
*) Simple linear regression
*) Deterministic decision models
*) Decision making under risk
*) Multiple decision makers, subjective probability and other wild beasts
*) Introduction to multivariate analysis
*) Advanced regression models
*) Dealing with complexity: Data reduction and clustering

 The author presupposes that the reader is very familiar with the topics before the chapter is encountered. There is no slack cut in terms of the level of difficulty of the mathematics. When a topic is first stated, it is as a reminder and not as a review. As the list and number of pages indicate, this is a book for a two or three semester course sequence in the mathematics used in high level quantitative methods used in business.
 Fundamentally, it is a text for courses designed for people that are math majors moving into quantitative business management. For that, it is an excellent book. Unlike some other books, no one can criticize this one for being weak on the math, I would suspect that the students using it would argue the contrary. 


This book was made available for free for review purposes

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