"it is hypothesized that the total sales of a corporation should vary more in an industry with active price competition than in one with duopoly and tacit collusion. in a study of the merchant ship production industry it was found that in 4 years of active price competition, the variance of company a’s total sales was 114.09. in the following 7 years, during which there was duopoly and tacit collusion, this variance was 16.08. assume that the data can be regarded as independent random sample from two normal distributions. test at the 5% level the null hypothesis that the two population variances are equal against the alternative that the variance of total sales is higher in years of active price competition."