Cindy Smith, VP of Finance at Digital Components, Inc

Multiple Choice

Cindy Smith, VP of Finance at Digital Components, Inc.(DCI) , theorizes that the discount level offered to credit customers affects the average collection period on credit sales.Accordingly, she has designed an experiment to test her theory using four sales discount rates (0%, 2%, 4%, and 6%) .Cindy wants to control for the size of the customer but not to test for it as the main variable of interest so she classified DCI's credit customers into three categories by total assets (small, medium, and large) .Then, she randomly assigned four customers from each category to a sales discount rate.In Cindy's experiment "total asset size of credit customer" is ___.

A) a surrogate variable
B) the dependent variable
C) a blocking variable
D) a treatment variable
E) a constant