Question

Hoping to lure more shoppers downtown, a city builds a new public parking garage in the central district. The city plans to pay for the structure through parking fees. During a two-week period (14 days), daily fees collected average $126 with standard deviation $15. We want to construct a confidence interval for the true mean daily fees collected at this parking garage.

(a) To construct the confidence interval, should you use the normal distribution orat distribution?
(b) Construct a 90% confidence interval.
(c) The consultant who advised the city on this project predicted that parking revenues would average $130 per day. Based on your confidence interval, do you think the consultant could have been correct? Why or why not?

Answer 1

a) For this case we need to use a t distribution since we know the information about a sample and we don't know the population deviation.

b)
`126-1.77(15)/(√(14))=118.904`

`126+1.77(15)/(√(14))=133.096`

So on this case the 90% confidence interval would be given by (118.904;133.096)

c) For this case since confidence interval include tha value of 130 so then we don't have enough evidence to conclude that the claim by the consultant is incorrect.

Explanation:

Part a

For this case we need to use a t distribution since we know the information about a sample and we don't know the population deviation.

Part b

A confidence interval is "a range of values that’s likely to include a population value with a certain degree of confidence. It is often expressed a % whereby a population means lies between an upper and lower interval".

The margin of error is the range of values below and above the sample statistic in a confidence interval.

`\bar X=126` represent the sample mean

`\mu` population mean (variable of interest)

s=15 represent the sample standard deviation

n=14 represent the sample size

The confidence interval for the mean is given by the following formula:

`\bar X \pm t_(\alpha/2)(s)/(√(n))` (1)

In order to calculate the critical value
`t_(\alpha/2)` we need to find first the degrees of freedom, given by:

`df=n-1=14-1=13`

Since the Confidence is 0.90 or 90%, the value of
`\alpha=0.1` and
`\alpha/2 =0.05`, and we can use excel, a calculator or a table to find the critical value. The excel command would be: "=-T.INV(0.05,13)".And we see that
`t_(\alpha/2)=1.77`

Now we have everything in order to replace into formula (1):

`126-1.77(15)/(√(14))=118.904`

`126+1.77(15)/(√(14))=133.096`

So on this case the 90% confidence interval would be given by (118.904;133.096)

Part c

For this case since confidence interval include tha value of 130 so then we don't have enough evidence to conclude that the claim by the consultant is incorrect.