Course Description Competition

Submission 1

Instructor: Jerker Denrell (Denrell_Jerker@GSB.Stanford.EDU)

Institution: Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

Course: “Organizational Learning”

Course Description: This is a course about why firms do not learn from their experiences and the opportunities created by flawed learning. It will explore common mistakes in learning and barriers to the adoption of effective practices.  Understanding learning problems will help future managers avoid common mistakes and build organizations that learn more effectively; learning is particularly important for entrepreneurs who are trying out new ideas and so must adapt correctly to feedback from the environment. 

But understanding common mistakes is also useful for identifying possible opportunities in markets; opportunities exist when firms make mistakes and when they fail to learn effective practices.  During the course, we will examine several examples of firms that took advantage of market inefficiencies created by flawed learning by established firms.

The course will introduce concepts and findings from organization theory, psychology, decision theory, and statistics. A variety of exercises, cases, and readings will be used to illustrate barriers to learning and the opportunities they create. Readings will include teaching notes, papers in psychology and organization theory, HBR articles, as well as the book “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis, which discusses market-level mistakes in professional baseball.

Submission 2

Instructor: Svetlana Eremenko (seremenko@yahoo.com)

Course: “Managerial Decision Making”

Course Description: If you enjoy the luxury of stable business, have enough time and resources to make careful, calculated decisions, this course is NOT for you.  If you are under time pressure to guess the risk involved in making choices, estimate probabilities for uncertain events, then welcome: this course on "managerial decision making" is designed to help you.

Submission 3

Instructors: L. Robin Keller (lrkeller@uci.edu) and Thomas Eppel

Institution: University of California, Irvine

Course: “Decision Analysis”
Course Description:

• Should we launch an aggressive marketing campaign that will require substantial resources with no guarantee of success?
• Which job candidate should I hire?
• What information technology will best serve the needs of our customer service department?

You will be facing many important and far-reaching decision situations in your professional life.  In such situations substantial resources may need to be committed, many different stakeholder groups may be involved in or affected by the decisions that you make, and a variety of potential consequences may be at stake.  This class will provide you with the tools to approach such situations with clarity and confidence and improve your decision making skills.
Making good decisions is one of the most important factors that determine how well you achieve your personal and professional goals.  Yet, how to make good decisions is rarely taught as a skill in its own right.  Consequently we approach decision situations tentatively, or even fearfully, we push them away and procrastinate, and we avoid giving important decisions the time and thought that they deserve.  This course will show you that decisions can and should be analyzed and introduce the basic ideas and procedures of Decision Analysis.
Decision Analysis provides a systematic way to approach decision situations.  It analyzes complex decision problems by breaking them into manageable pieces and by providing important insights that will lead to clarity of thought and commitment to action.  Yet, Decision Analysis is not a “hard-nosed” calculation of the costs and benefits of various alternatives.  Instead, it includes and encourages the exploration and representation of very personal and subjective values and opinions.  Thus, you, and not some “black box,” are in control of your decisions.  And, since the framework of decision analysis is very general, you can use it for both professional and personal decision situations.
Decision analysis methods help us handle complexities in decision making.

• Multiple conflicting objectives (e.g., risk vs. return, market share vs. short-term profit)
• Multiple “stakeholders” (e.g., group decisions, shareholders, future generations)
• Uncertainties and risks (e.g., product success, market share, interest rates)
• Input from varied models (e.g., consumer behavior, engineering design, risk perceptions)

Origins of Decision Analysis:

• Probability theory and statistics (Bernoulli, Laplace, Reverend Bayes, Savage)
• Economics (von Neumann, Morgenstern)
• Psychology (Edwards, Tversky, Kahneman (2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics for behavioral economics))
• Consulting, applications (Raiffa, Howard, Keeney)

Areas of Application of Decision Analysis:

• R & D decisions (e.g., pharmaceutical industry)
• Marketing (e.g., new product development)
• Medical decision making (e.g., individualized treatment, policies about widespread testing)
• Finance (e.g., option pricing, risk attitudes)
• Risk analysis (e.g., nuclear safety)
• Public policy (e.g., electromagnetic field policy analysis)
• Environmental management (e.g., waste cleanup, standard setting)

Submission 4

Instructor: Dale Rude (drude@uh.edu)

Institution: University of Houston

Course: “Behavioral Finance”

Course Description:  Course conceptual tools will help you to accumulate “enough” wealth to live comfortably throughout your life.  Because the stock market is important for building wealth, our focus will be on operating characteristics of a) the stock market and b) you as a decision maker within it.  We will examine two major questions.
1) Can the stock market be predicted?  Our focus will be on long term success. It is extremely difficult to accurately predict the stock market long term.
2) What decision processes are used by investors and how do they lead investors astray?  We are “programmed” to seek patterns in information and to extrapolate from limited information.  Thus, we find it easy to believe that we have found “the method” for predicting the market.  Unfortunately, this is very risky because the market is extremely unforgiving.

On a more formal level, behavioral finance is a) the study of how systematic departures from rationality affect financial markets and the welfare of investors and b) a new field focused on the interface between finance and the fields of psychology and management. Three general topics comprise the field. The first major topic is the decision behavior of individuals acting within a market context such as the stock market. A major focus is systematic errors that investors make. The second is application of psychological principles to predict market movement. Third are real world market anomalies, which are difficult to explain with market models such as the efficient market hypothesis. The emphases for the class are a) understanding individual decision behavior within a market context (85%), and c) applying psychological principles to modify parameters within market models (5%), and c) market anomalies (10%).

Submission 5

Instructor: Uri Simonsohn (uws@wharton.upenn.edu)

Institution: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Course: “Managerial Decision Making”

Course Description: Making decisions, from the trivial to the fundamental, is part of the everyday life of every manager, investor and consumer.  For the last 30 years psychologists –and more recently also economists- have studied how people process information and actually make decisions (rather than how they would make them if they were fully rational and selfish).  This research program has provided an insightful understanding of how people’s decisions deviate from “optimal” ones, and the consequences of such biases in financial and personal terms.  This course is devoted to understanding the nature, causes and implications of these limitations.