MBA and Sloan Elective Courses: Managerial Economics
MGTECON 203. Managerial Economics–Accelerated
MGTECON 203 will be a somewhat faster paced version of MGTECON 200. We'll cover more material, more quickly. How do we do it? The presumption is that the people in this class have at least a little background in economics (this is very helpful, though not completely essential), and a basic level of comfort with first year calculus—derivatives, partial derivatives, and the concept of an integral even though you probably won't have to take one. It's not so much that the mathematics in 203 will be any harder or different than that in 200, but I will feel that I have a license to use it with more impunity. The advantage of 203, then, is that I expect to spend less time on "plumbing", going through some calculations more quickly than I would do in 200, and using this extra time to discuss more things that I think of as interesting and practical.
MGTECON 300. Growth and Stabilization in the Global Economy
This course gives students the background they need to understand the broad movements in the global economy. Key topics include long-run economic growth, technological change, wage inequality, international trade, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates, and monetary policy. By the end of the course, students should be able to read and understand the discussions of economics issues in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Congressional Budget Office.
MGTECON 330. Economics of Organization
This is an advanced economics course that applies recent innovations and high-powered tools to organization and general management. The course requires a strong background in microeconomics and combines both lectures and cases. The course objective is to equip managers with an extensive set of analytical and applicable tools for handling topics such as: organization for coordination, moral hazard and monitoring, corporate governance, organizing information, managing supplier relations and downstream controls, repeated interactions, incomplete contracts, bargaining, strategizing with unawareness and other topics.
MGTECON 331. Political Economy of Health Care in the US
The purpose of this class is to provide students with the economic tools, and the institutional and legal background, to understand how markets for health care products and services work. The class has four parts, consisting of a combination of case studies, lectures, and visits from individuals from the industry: 1) the economic tools: understanding moral hazard and adverse election; 2) the institutional organization of the health are sector in the US-hospital and physician services markets-integrated delivery systems-managed care-pharmaceutical and medical device industries; 3) public policy issues in health care, medical ethics, regulation of managed care, the patient?s bill of rights? regulation of pharmaceuticals, reform of Medicare-universal health insurance and coverage of the uninsured; 4) international perspective-how have other countries? health care systems evolved and what can the US learn from their experience. Also listed as Health Research and Policy (HRP) 391.
MGTECON 332. Analysis of Costs, Risks, and Benefits of Health Care
This course examines the application of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis, along with other evaluation techniques, to products and services, like medical care, whose ?output? is difficult to measure. How can these techniques help consumers, employers, and government obtain high value for their expenditures on health care? How can they help producers of medical products and services anticipate reimbursement and market demand? The course will begin with the principles of economic evaluation techniques applied to health care. It will focus on a critical review of studies that apply such techniques to specific clinical problems. The emphasis is on insights into the practical application and the state of the art in research on this issue. The course culminates in a major project, in which groups of students apply these techniques to a topic or technology of their choice. Prerequisite: MGTECON 200 or equivalent basic microeconomics course. Also listed in the Medical School as Health Research and Policy (HRP) 392.
