S0411 Strategic Thinking

The purpose of this course is to enable students to set up and solve typical strategic problems arising in business and economics. The necessary skills are developed by working out common applications and examples of typical setups. The examples range from the Bible to Wall Street, and are often inspired by the news.The target audience includes any undergraduate student with a serious interest about strategy: this covers a lot of interests - those who want to take on the casinos, those who want to be lawyers, those who want to pursue graduate studies in economics, and those who aim for an M.B.A. and a business career.\r\n

Prerequisites:
You are expected to have completed one year of college mathematics, or otherwise being able to differentiate the common functions, compute the expected value of a random variable, and solve small systems of linear equations.

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Teaching method

\r\nThe course is thirteen weeks long, with two meetings per week. Each week we cover a different item in the list below: the first class covers the theory and the second class goes over the case studies. One week has been set apart to cover additional topics of interest to the class, or work out new cases, or simply do a review.