Quantitative Methods for Business, Management and Finance, 2nd ed.

Citation

Wilson, J.M. (2006), "Quantitative Methods for Business, Management and Finance, 2nd ed.", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 85-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465660610667829

This textbook is targeted at introductory courses for undergraduate business students. It is designed to meet the needs of students with virtually no background in maths and considerable material is provided purposefully to remedy those deficiencies. Swift and Piff divide their book into six sections spread over 850 pages. I found the first two sections to be a fundamental review (covering numbers, fractions, algebra and linear functions in the first and non‐linear functions and differential calculus in the second) of the simplest concepts and basic quantitative methods. I cannot imagine that any university course could devote lecture time to the “Essential Maths” material without alienating many students. Nevertheless, such material may be essential for the numbers of students that have difficulties with any mathematics. The authors comment that this section of the text may be treated as a self‐study component; and that too is the reviewer's sentiment. This is essential background and should be available; but students with more than a rudimentary grasp of mathematics should progress to the later sections. The second introductory section is more demanding and would be useful general background for courses in economics, econometrics or financial mathematics. The chapters include sets of examples and problems relevant to business. These two sections comprise some 250 pages – a veritable textbook on their own.

The latter sections of the book are largely about probability, statistics and operational research. The book gives a gentle introductory chapter on graphs and their use followed by one on summarizing and presenting numerical data. These are sound treatments with numerous examples. The next section introduces probability and deals with the underlying basic concepts, and goes on to discuss probability distributions to provide a basis for the section on statistics. That section covers sampling briefly and its use for estimation and hypothesis testing. Correlation and simple linear regression are then described. The chapter on simple forecasting did not apply regression analysis as might have been expected, but instead considers time series and moving average based methods. The book's treatment of probability and statistics seems more than adequate except for regression. That seems somewhat short‐changed for it and its many possible applications in business gets rather little coverage. This is one of the weaker areas of the text, given the prevalence of regression‐based models found in economics and finance. For a text intended to be comprehensive this lack of development is a little disappointing.

The final section of the book on business modeling seems almost an afterthought, with seven topics given a total of roughly 150 pages of coverage. Linear programming, project planning, economic order quantity models, financial mathematics, decision analysis, statistical quality control and simulation are all given perfunctory treatments. These chapters are all shorter than those in the preceding sections. They help provide a “comprehensive” text but breadth is gained by sacrificing depth. For an introductory text rather more on the financial mathematics and their application would better serve as a foundation for later studies. Of the operational research topics project management might be the most widely useful, while decision analysis would most readily tie‐in to earlier discussions of probability with examples of how such statistical understandings are incorporated in business decision making.

Swift and Piff have produced a sound text, eminently suitable for their primary market: undergraduate business students. The middle half is an excellent treatment of the topics. The first third of the book provides a sound background for those students with weak mathematical skills. The last section, is somewhat superficial but fleshes the text out to sustain its claim to comprehensiveness. It covers the topics but the text's heart is really in its discussion of probability and statistics and it does that well for its target audience.