Business: Phone Contact How hard is it to reach a businessperson by phone?

Let p be the proportion of calls to businesspeople for which the caller reaches the person being called on the first try.

(a) If you have no preliminary estimate for p, how many business phone calls should you include in a random sample to be 80% sure that the point estimate pˆ will be within a distance of 0.03 from p?

(b) The Book of Odds by Shook and Shook (Signet) reports that businesspeople can be reached by a single phone call approximately 17% of the time.

Using this (national) estimate for p, answer part (a).