Case Article—Creating a Brick Empire Through Data Visualization and Analytics

This case study provides a comprehensive decision-making scenario that takes students through all three types of analytics—descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive—to provide recommendations to a decision maker. The scenario focuses on an individual investor who is purchasing LEGO sets from retailers with the goal of selling them for a higher price on the aftermarket in a few years once they retire from shelves. Students must create visualizations to generate insights from the data and develop a regression model to identify sets that represent value investment opportunities. In the extension case they must take their estimated values and optimize the decisions of which sets to purchase to meet the decision maker’s investment goals using an integer program. Students also have the opportunity to develop soft skills in problem solving and communicating results and dealing with missing data points in a data set that is larger than standard textbook data sets but is still a manageable size for introductory students. The open-ended instructions make the case appropriate for a wide range of students from the introductory undergraduate level to the advanced graduate level.