Stat of the Week Competition Winner: June 2-8 2012

Thanks for all those who nominated in last week’s Stat of the Week competition.

This week we’re awarding Nick Iversen’s nomination of the NZ Herald’s article “CEO Pay Survey: Salaries stall for NZ’s top bosses” with some nice re-analysis:

The Herald says “the value of the average chief executive pay packet has dropped” and quote the drop in average pay as 0.4%

That’s one way of looking at the data. Here’s another way:

Of the CEOs surveyed 13 had drops in pay and 22 had pay rises. The median pay drop was 7%, the median pay rise was 18.5%.

Of if you prefer mean the mean pay drop was 13.5%, the mean pay rise was 26%.

So most of them had pay rises and the rises were higher than the drops. Looks to me as if the CEOs had a very good year.

One might argue that that this is just an arithmetic blunder, but it does raise (the usual) questions of means and medians.