MBA and Sloan Elective Courses: Managerial Economics
MGTECON 200. Managerial Economics
This course covers microeconomic concepts relevant to managerial decision making. Topics include: demand and supply analysis; consumer demand theory; production theory; price discrimination; perfect competition; partial equilibrium welfare analysis; externalities and public goods; risk aversion and risk sharing; hidden information and signaling; moral hazard and incentives; game theory; oligopoly; and auctions.
MGTECON 203. Managerial Economics–Accelerated
This course will cover the usual array of topics covered in microeconomics beginning with the economics of small numbers interactions (using the language of noncooperative game theory and emphasizing the economics of information and transactions costs), moving in the end to markets with large numbers of participants (perfect competition and variants).
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. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 301. Applied Macroeconomics
The topics covered in each class session will be selected opportunistically, with an emphasis on student interest and current events. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 304. Business and International Development
This course is a Bass Seminar. Working in teams, students will undertake an in-depth study of a practical topic in international development. The topics will vary, but the common theme will be the design of implementable mechanisms. Examples of what could fit are: new issues in microcredit; policy design for an oil-rich country to avoid the resource curse; the role of corporations in failed states. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 316. Corporate Strategy
No description available. Not taught in 2009-10.
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 United States
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 selection; 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, regulation of pharmaceuticals, reform of Medicare, 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.
MGTECON 332. Analysis of Costs, Risks, and Benefits of Health Care
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.
MGTECON 334. The International Economy: Policies and Theory
The objective of this course is to give students an understanding of what international trade policy means for business leaders. To do this, students will have to understand the economic forces that determine the patterns and consequences of international trade. We will analyze trade policy tools used by governments (e.g., tariffs, subsidies and quotas), and examine the role of industry and politics at the domestic and global level in applying these tools. This course will combine lecture, case studies and group interaction.
MGTECON 352. Trading Market Making and Exchanges
Businesses and individuals regularly rely on organized trading markets to facilitate transactions. Examples of such markets include online trading platforms such as EBAY, and traditional financial markets such as the NYSE and the LSE. This course examines what is called the market microstructure of trading markets. Specifically, we will consider factors that affect the viability of markets, the intermediaries that make them, trading platforms, how the rules of trade affect the efficiency of markets, and the role of moral hazard and adverse selection in trade. Our discussions will focus on the structure of financial, commodity and web-based markets around the world. The course will also use trading simulations to demonstrate the practical realities of trading and the need for structure on exchanges. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 353. Making a Business by Making Markets
Traditional management and economics courses view businesses as manufacturers selling to consumers. These paradigms unfortunately have limited relevance in understanding the business models and success of EBAY, Goldman Sachs, Hotels.com, Coldwell Banker, Kleiner Perkins, the NYSE Group, and MasterCard. Each of these companies is a type of market intermediary. Market intermediaries occupy a position in between the demanders and suppliers of a good or service. Their business models: help match buyers and sellers; reduce transaction costs; standardize transactions; provide trading platforms; and control information. This course examines the business models of market intermediaries and what makes them successful. We will also learn about the competitive pressures market intermediaries face. Besides discussing the general economics and business models of market intermediaries, we will study the specifics of real estate brokerage, online dating companies, automobile and Web auction sites, venture capital firms, credit card networks, stock brokers and investment banks. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 364. Managing Talents
This course is a Bass Seminar. Most of the people whom GSB graduates manage are high-skill high-talent employees. The goal in this limited enrollment, hands-on course is to apply lessons learned in human resources and economics courses to real world situations. Therefore, the course combines visits to companies and student project presentations to study the management of firms whose competitive objective is to capture value from high-talent employees. The course focuses on consulting firms, VC firms, venture philanthropy firms, and also high-skill divisions within firms (like marketing groups or global product design teams). Examples of topics to be discussed include: how to reward "stars," evaluating and rewarding talent, ownership and sale of talent (how best to sell your skills), weighing team goals versus individual goals, the value of networks within and across firms, and "career" management (of the careers of your employees and of your own). Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 502. International Development
About half of the people in the world live on $2 a day or less. This course will examine underdevelopment from a business-school point of view: i.e., that nations are poor because their markets and firms aren't working as they should. The questions we will examine range from what policies could reduce poverty to how to do business as a foreign firm in an emerging economy. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 503. Buying and Selling a Private Business: Theory and Practice
This course will discuss theoretical and practical issues in structuring the process for buying or selling companies. The focus will be on transactions such the sale of either part or all of a private company to another firm, venture capitalists, or the public, and the sale a division of a public company. We will try to look at transactions from the different perspectives of the various players. On the theoretical side the course will discuss insights from auction theory (and game theory more generally) such as: asymmetric information, signaling, tradeoffs in talking to a larger or smaller number of potential bidders, strategic versus financial buyers, toeholds, worries about collusion, the importance of reputation, and auctions versus sequential negotiations. Perhaps the key point is recognizing the importance for each player of putting himself in the shoes of the others. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 506. Equity Markets: Share Ownership and Corporate Governance
This course will discuss theoretical and practical issues in how investment returns in the public equity markets are impacted by share ownership and corporate governance. On the theoretical side, the course will discuss the latest empirical research on the link between return to shareholders and type of investor such as institutional, retail, or management. A there will be a discussion of the role of activist versus passive hedge funds as well as that of private equity firms in the public markets, and the implications of concentrated share ownership. The course will evaluate the evidence that corporate governance structures, such as staggered boards, poison pills, and proxy voting, may impact investment returns. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 507. Information in Markets and Markets of Information
The seminar has two distinct parts. In the first part it will study the form, role, and dynamics of information in markets. It will identify the information structure and how it varies with market design and will analyze how these various aspects of information impact trade. In the second part the focus will be on markets that are designed to elicit or leverage information. Topics will cover: prediction markets from elections to sports, PAM (Department of Defense program), firms' internal markets, the Hollywood Exchange and more. The class will analyze the types of information that can be extracted with a market and the features of the market design. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 508. Reform and Growth in Emerging Markets
At the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in October 1985, Secretary of the Treasury, James A. Baker III, outlined the official U.S. position on economic policy reform in developing countries' tenets that came to be known as the Washington Consensus. Today, the Consensus is no less controversial than it was when first unveiled. Anti-globalization protesters blame Consensus-driven policies for the economic divide between rich and poor nations. Advocates of the Consensus argue that a lack of commitment to economic reform by poor countries drives the ever-widening gap. Does economic reform help or hurt emerging economies? This course will try to answer this question by using the tools of macroeconomics to analyze the experiences of several countries with economic reform. Likely candidates include: Argentina, China, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Singapore, Ghana, and Hong Kong. In the process of trying to answer the question of whether economic reform promotes growth, students will develop a deeper understanding of how to analyze the macroeconomic environment that companies must navigate when they do business in emerging markets. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 511. Applied Macroeconomics
The goal of the course is to develop a student's ability to understand and provide macroeconomic analysis in both verbal and written forms. Not taught in 2009-10.
MGTECON 525. Perspectives on the Financial Crisis and the Global Recession
This class will bring together GSB professors from several disciplines to explore the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis.
MGTECON 591. Management Practices in Europe, the US, and Emerging Markets
The course will review the results from a large management practices project involving Harvard, the London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company and Stanford. McKinsey & Company have developed a basic management practice evaluation tool – detailing the 18 key practices in firms – which has been used to evaluate almost 10,000 organizations in manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education across the US, Europe, Asia, Australasia and South America. These results provide a global insight into the basic management practices around monitoring, targets and talent management that firms adopt around the world, their link to performance, and the reasons for differences in these across countries. This will be supplemented with the results from more recent research with Accenture and the World Bank in India carrying out change-management interventions. The course will focus on four areas: 1) Science of Management Practices; 2) Why management practices vary across industries and countries; 3) How firms are differently organized around the world; 4) Improving management practices in developing countries.