Whois & Analysis for ibisworld.com

Market research is any organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers.

It is a very important component of business strategy.

The term is commonly interchanged with marketing research; however, expert practitioners may wish to draw a distinction, in that marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes, while market research is concerned specifically with markets.

Statistics is a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data.

In applying statistics to, e.g., a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model process to be studied.

Populations can be diverse topics such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal".

Statistics deals with all aspects of data including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.

Forecasting is the process of making predictions of the future based on past and present data and most commonly by analysis of trends.

A commonplace example might be estimation of some variable of interest at some specified future date.

Prediction is a similar, but more general term.

Both might refer to formal statistical methods employing time series, cross-sectional or longitudinal data, or alternatively to less formal judgmental methods.

Usage can differ between areas of application: for example, in hydrology the terms "forecast" and "forecasting" are sometimes reserved for estimates of values at certain specific future times, while the term "prediction" is used for more general estimates, such as the number of times floods will occur over a long period.

This article deals with decision-making as analyzed in psychology.

See also Decision theory.

In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several alternative possibilities.

Every decision-making process produces a final choice; it may or may not prompt action.

Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision-maker.

A business (also known as an enterprise, a company or a firm) is an organizational entity involved in the provision of goods and services to consumers.

Businesses serve as a form of economic activity, and are prevalent in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and provide goods and services allocated through a market to consumers and customers in exchange for other goods, services, money, or other forms of exchange that hold intrinsic economic value.

Businesses may also be social non-profit enterprises or state-owned public enterprises operated by governments with specific social and economic objectives.

A business owned by multiple private individuals may form as an incorporated company or jointly organise as a partnership.

Countries have different laws that may ascribe different rights to the various business entities.