I’ve been assigned a bad starting team in MarkStrat

There is a MarkStrat simulation where each team starts with different products and has established revenues and sales which are again all different. I’ve noticed that the most common simulation doesn’t do this and everyone gets the same starting products, SPI and revenues, which makes the simulation a lot more fair. Especially if your grades depend on your end SPI ranking.

Your college unfortunately uses the former MarkStrat simulation, and now you are left wondering if you are starting with a disadvantage.

Having completed a number of simulations with this starting position format, the short answer is yes, statistically, depending on your starting team you will do worse or better then other teams.

To test this I did a simple ANOVA test on the individual team results and the P value was 0.006453865, which is significantly below 0.05. This tells us there is difference in the means of the SPI depending on the team you started with.

Running individual T-tests, there was only a statistical difference between the top and bottom average teams. What this means is if you have been assigned team L or team M, you are statistically at a disadvantage compared to teams N and team R. If you have been assigned team S or team T, you don’t have much to worry about.