A real-estate agent conducted an experiment to test the effect of selling a staged home vs. selling an empty
home. To do so, the agent obtained a list of 10
comparable homes just listed for sale that were currently
empty. He randomly assigned 5 of the homes to be
"staged," meaning they were filled with nice furniture and
decorated. The owners of the 5 homes all agreed to
have their homes staged by professional decorators.
The other 5 homes remained empty. The hypothesis is
that empty homes are not as appealing to buyers as
staged homes and therefore, sell for lower prices than
staged homes. The mean selling price of the 5 empty
homes was $150,000 with a standard deviation of
$22,000. The mean selling price of the 5 staged homes
was $175,000 with a standard deviation of 35,000. A
dotplot of each sample shows no strong skewness and
no outliers.