Fall Term (October – December)

This two-course sequence provides students with an analytical approach for solving managerial problems and making decisions. We begin the process by describing and interpreting data, as well as by developing a rigorous description of the problem. This descriptive analytics stage includes the development of summary statistics, data visualization, and robust mathematical models. A fundamental goal of our analytical process is to separate the ‘signal’ from the ‘noise,’ and we will see how the fundamental principles of probability can be applied both directly to making decisions as well as how they are linked to more advanced data analytics techniques.

Many decisions then require predictive analytics for making decisions. Here we will use sophisticated statistical and predictive analytics tools to understand and anticipate how the world will change if we take certain actions. These include hypothesis testing, A/B testing, linear and logistic regression, simulation analysis, and machine learning. We will employ cutting-edge methods for fitting models and testing their sensitivity to assumptions.

Some problems require a more formal process for recommending actions. For this prescriptive analytics stage of our process, we will employ mathematical optimization techniques and see how analytics may be used to solve large-scale business problems.

We will apply our analytical process to problems from all organizational functions (e.g., marketing, operations, finance, management, economics) and to a variety of industries (e.g., online promotion and advertising, airlines, manufacturing, and health care). There will be hands-on experience using Excel, Excel plug-ins, and the R statistical programming language.

This course provides a detailed overview of the world’s debt, equity, and derivatives markets. We start with the fundamentals of how the markets function and then move on to more advanced topics such as the determinants of interest rates, the trade-off between risk and return, the behavior of stock prices, and the pricing and uses of futures and options contracts. We illustrate how and why capital markets are important to investors and managers using real-world problems.

This course offers the “essential” toolkit of the executive involved in the strategy process—the key ideas, concepts, and tools that are necessary to properly exercise strategic leadership. The course is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the strategy problem at the business unit level. It is at the business unit level that many key strategic choices and actions are formulated and undertaken. This part of the course starts by proposing a vocabulary and an analytical structure that help define competitive advantage precisely. It then tackles the question of how a strategic leader can locate opportunities to achieve sustained competitive advantage. This part of the course concludes with a discussion of why strategic leaders should be not only competent “practitioner economists”––the ability to read market forces is the traditional focus of competitive strategy analysis and tools––but also competent “practitioner psychologists,” and what developing such competence entails. The second part of the course focuses on the challenge of managing multiple business units. In particular, it focuses on how a strategic leader can determine the ideal horizontal and vertical scope for their firm and what that implies for mergers, acquisitions, and various typologies of alliances.

The marketing course prepares managers to understand the strategic role of marketing and how to apply it in their organizations. The course teaches how to grow a business by thoroughly understanding its current and prospective customers, the only source of a firm’s revenue. Companies with high or increasing market capitalizations know how to create, communicate, and deliver value to their customers. Students will learn how to create such value by applying a set of frameworks and analytical tools in three areas: identifying market opportunities, setting a marketing strategy, and formulating the marketing mix. Case studies and practical applications are used to develop experience in implementing these frameworks and analytical tools in order to grow a business. Specific course topics include market research, consumer decision making, market segmentation, targeting, positioning, branding, product development, advertising, pricing, distribution, marketing across borders, and marketing for a better world.