A pharmacist has been monitoring sales of a certain over-the-counter pain reliever. Daily sales during the last 15 days were:

• Justify your selection of either a linear trend equation or trend-adjusted exponential smoothing to predict future sales.
• If you learn that on some days the store ran out of the specific pain reliever, would that knowledge cause you any concern? Explain.
• Assume that the data refer to demand rather than sales. Using trend-adjusted smoothing with an initial forecast of 50 for day 8, an initial trend estimate of 2, and = = .3, develop forecasts for days 9 through 16. What is the Mean Squared Error (MSE) for the eight forecasts for which there are actual data?

Day Number Sold

1 36

2 38

3 42

4 44

5 48

6 49

7 50

8 49

9 52

10 48

11 52

12 55

13 54

14 56

15 57