Tag: Olympics

Guest Post: A Class Exercise Relating Productivity and the Olympics

HowardWeiss2Howard Weiss is Professor of Operations Management at Temple University. He has developed both POM for Windows and Excel OM for our text
When I teach productivity, I like to explain to the students that while output/input seems simple, it can be difficult to assess.  The Heizer/Render textbook includes multifactor productivity (Chapter 1) where the multiple factors are all inputs, and I like to ask my students to take it a step further.

There are many web sites that list the Olympic medal count for any Olympics. I show my students the top medal-winning countries from one of the more recent Olympics, such as those listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics_medal_table.

When I am in the classroom I ask my students, “What information would you want in order to answer the question, “Which of the 5 countries shown below was the most productive in the 2012 Olympics?” This raises many interesting issues. Students will discuss the different inputs that might be used such as population, dollars spent training the Olympians and number of athletes competing. Some students will note that different outputs can be used. For example, outputs could be total medals or a weighted average of gold, silver and bronze medals. For the 2012 Olympics, I point out that based on the sorting in Wikipedia, it is using only gold measures, as its output measure as can be seen when comparing Great Britain and Russia or South Korea and Germany.

I also ask the students to find websites that list the countries in a manner that we would call productivity. This web site has a graph of the top 8 countries based on medals per athlete while this one includes the inverse of productivity in its table on athletes per medal.

The students generally find this to be a fun exercise and appreciate that inputs and outputs may not be as simple as one might think. In the course of searching for Olympic productivity on web sites, they also find sites that are interesting even though the site does not answer the productivity question. One example is this site, which explains that American workers are less productive during the Olympics. Finally, the exercise was very timely this past week since the Olympics are currently going on.

OM in the News: Using Regression Analysis to Forecast Olympic Medals

olympicsHow many medals will the U.S. walk away with at this year’s Winter Olympics? What about perennial runner-up China? Two brothers, writes Fast Company (Feb. 7, 2014), have the answers. Since the 2010 Winter games, the two collected more than 30 datasets and ran regression after regression until they found a model that accurately matched the past two Winter Olympics.  According to Tim and Dan Graettingers’ model, the U.S. will walk away once more with the most overall medals, though it won’t come close to last Olympic’s record-setting 37 individual awards.  China, which only won 11 medals in the last Winter Games, is set to double its haul.

For the final model, the Graettingers found that only four variables consistently predicted a country’s medal count in the Olympics (with an R-squared of .585):

Geographic area – Their best guess is that it may reflect the nation’s population and/or the genetic diversity within the nation and/or the presence of mountain ranges on which to ski and snowboard.  Also, it does separate the relatively larger nations of the world from the many small (geographically and population-wise) island nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

GDP per capita –  It seems to confirm the hunch that nations whose people are affluent can afford to spend time pursuing excellence in sports, while poorer nations cannot.

Value of Exports – This measure of a nation’s total economic power seems to complement per capita GDP.

Latitude of Nation’s Capital –  The further your country is from the equator, the more snow and ice you’ll have – and the more medals you’ll win at sports contested on snow and ice.

By the way, no nation from Africa, South America, or the Middle East has ever won a medal at the Winter Olympic Games.  No nation from the Caribbean has either, despite the worthy efforts of the Jamaican bobsled team!

Classroom discussion questions:

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this model?

2. How accurate were the brother’s forecasts when the final 2014 tally was completed at the end of the games? (Here is a link to their country by country forecasts).