Question: Barbara Dwyer, the manager at Lux Hotel, makes every effort to ensure that customers attempting to make phone reservations do not have to wait too long to speak with a reservation specialist. Since the hotel accepts phone reservations 24 hours a day, Barbara is especially interested in maintaining consistency in service. Barbara wants to determine if the variance of wait time in the early morning shift differs from that in the late morning shift. She uses the following independently drawn samples of wait time for phone reservations for both shifts for the analysis. The data can be found on the text website and are labeled Wait Times. Assume that wait times are normally distributed.
a. Specify the appropriate hypotheses to test if the variance of wait time in the early morning shift differs from that in the late morning shift.
b. Use Excel's F.TEST function to conduct the test at the 1% level of significance.
c. Does the variance of wait time in the early morning shift differ from that in the late afternoon shift?