Results for MGTECON

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 transaction cost economics.

MGTECON 203 is the accelerated option in microeconomics for 1st year MBA students. It will cover the usual array of topics, with an emphasis on topics more useful for students of management (although the order in which the topics are covered will be different from that in 200). No previous background in economics is required or expected, but in comparison with MGTECON 200, less time will be spent in class on basic problems. Therefore, students choosing this option should be completely comfortable with calculus and linear algebra. A good diagnostic is to read Sections 3.5 and 3.6 (pp. 57-67) in Kreps, Microeconomics for Managers. If you find this easy, 203 is a good choice. If not, 200 is the right course for you. Students with extensive background in microeconomics should take one of the Advanced Applications options; in particular, MGTECON 203 is NOT a good fit for students who have an undergraduate major in economics.

This course will be divided into two halves. The first half of the course will provide an introduction to Statistics. We will cover the very basics (calculating means, standard deviations, etc.), then work our way up to hypothesis testing and several sessions on the basics of regression analysis. There will be a Regression Project due in the middle of the quarter and a mid-term that will cover the Statistics material. The second half of the course is an introduction to Microeconomics, focusing on microeconomic concepts relevant to managerial decision making. Topics include demand and supply, cost structure, price discrimination, perfect competition, externalities, and the basics of game theory. The final exam will cover material from the Microeconomics portion of the course. No prior Economics or Statistics background is required but students who have not had courses in this area (or not had one in a very long time) may want to brush up on math prior to the start of classes.

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 economic issues in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Congressional Budget Office.

This is an advanced applications economics course that applies recent innovations and high-powered tools to organization and general management. MBA1 students must have a strong background in microeconomics to take the course and should consult with their advisors. The course is appropriate for MBA2 students who have taken either Mgtecon 200 or Mgtecon 203. The course objective is to equip managers with an extensive set of analytical and applicable tools for handling the following topics: organization for coordination, designing incentives for moral hazard, monitoring and private information, applications to scope, scale, global management and mergers, principles for allocating decision power, managing supplier relations, downstream controls, franchising and alliances, bargaining, high order reasoning, repeated interactions and reputation, holdups and strategizing with unawareness. These topics will be covered in a combination of lectures and cases.

This course provides the legal, instititional, and economic background necessary to understand the financing and production of health services in the US. Potential topics include: health reform, health insurance (Medicare and Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, the uninsured), medical malpractice and quality regulation, pharmaceuticals, the corporate practice of medicine, regulation of fraud and abuse, and international comparisons.

For graduate students. The principal evaluative techniques for health care, including utility assessment, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and decision analysis. Emphasis is on the practical application of these techniques. Group project presented at end of quarter. Guest lectures by experts from the medical school, pharmaceutical industry, health care plans, and government.

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.

This class will focus on the evolution of the financial crisis and the implications for the future of financial markets. Topics will include the housing bubble, the fall of large financial institutions (Bear Stearns, Lehman, AIG, Citibank, Fannie and Freddie), the role of derivatives, fair value/mark-to-market accounting, policy responses including TARP, TGLP, and proposals for broader reforms (clearing houses, revised capital requirements, contingent capital), and the implications of the weakened state of government finances both in the United States and internationally. There will likely be a co-lecturer with significant Wall Street experience participating regularly in the class, as well as occasional guest speakers.

Economic issues permeate all that happens in government. This topics-based course will exam a variety of historic and current issues on the political agenda where economics is central to decision making. It is taught by faculty who served at the White House in either the Clinton or George W. Bush Administration.

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. nnnThe course will be take about 15 hours, and will focus on four areas:nnn1. Science of Management Practices:nnThe key practices that appear to help determine company performance. A combination of a detailed discussion of the management practice grid, class examples and self-scoring, and results from the research work on the 10,000 firms. The aim is to cover the basic management practice evaluation tool that can be used to perform an initial overview of the management practices of any organization. For example, this would be ideal for an initial evaluation of the management practices in a private equity target company or a preliminary evaluation of a potential client by a consulting firm.nn nn2. Why management practices vary across industries and countries:nnThe addresses the question on why so many firms around the world appear not to be adopting management best practices? The aim is to explain why organizations often are unable to adopt managerial best practices and what types of actions can help to address this. For example, what is the role of family, government and private equity ownership on management practices, how do labor market regulations in countries like France and Germany affect management, does the shortage of skilled employees in Brazil matter for good management, what is the potential impact of increasing trade competition on firms practices, and why are public sector organizations like schools and hospitals typically so much worse managed than private sector manufacturing and retail?nnn3. How firms are differently organized around the world:nnMore recent work has focused on why firms in some countries are very flat with decentralized decision making (US, UK, Canada and Scandinavia) while others are very hierarchical (Southern Europe, China and India). The aim is to use this to illustrate with extensive data and case studies some of the key organizational and cultural differences of firms across countries, and how this helps to explain national performance. For example, firms in developing countries tend to be much smaller in part because owners appear to decentralized decisions to (non-family) managers - why is this and should foreign firms operating in developing countries do the same?nnn4. Improving management practices in developing countries:nnThe final section will focus on recent work run with Accenture and the World Bank, and supported by the Murty family. An extensive project has been working with a large group of medium-sized (250 employee) Indian textile firms to analyze their initial management practices and improve these over time. Extremely detailed performance data has been collected on these firms before, during and after the management intervention. The class will investigate in detail why many of these firms were initially so badly managed, why they struggled to improve their management practices, and what lessons this has for smaller firms in Europe and the US who face many of the same challenges.nnnThe course will be taught by Nick Bloom (Economics Department), who previously worked as business policy adviser in the UK Treasury and as an Associate Consultant at McKinsey. nnnInterested students can look at some of the academic, business and media focused output from the research on: http://www.stanford.edu/~nbloom/, including over 20 articles in the New York Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, Newsweek, Washington Post and the Financial Times. Lecture notes from the 2009 course (which this year will extend) are posted on online.

This course provides an introduction to the foundations of modern microeconomic theory. Topics include choice theory, with and without uncertainty, consumer and producer theory, dynamic choice and dynamic programming, social choice and efficiency, and fundamentals of general equilibrium.

This course studies the roles of information, incentives and strategic behavior in markets. The rudiments of game theory are developed and applied to selected topics regarding auctions, bargaining, and firms' competitive strategies; information economics; and contracting and market design.

This course covers auction theory, matching, and related parts of the literature on bargaining and pricing. Key papers in the early part of the course are Myerson and Satterthwaite on bargaining, Myerson on optimal auctions, and Milgrom and Weber's classic work. We then turn to markets in which complicated preferences and constraints, limitations on the use of cash, or variations in contract details among bidders play an important role. Emphasis is on matching markets such as the National Resident Matching Program and asset auctions such as the spectrum auctions.

This is the first course in the sequence in graduate econometrics. The course covers probability and statistics and, accordingly, is most appropriately viewed as a background course in these topics in preparation for taking up econometrics in 604. Prerequisites are a strong background in undergraduate calculus, linear algebra and probability and statistics. Topics covered in the course include random variables, distribution functions, functions of random variables, expectations, conditional probabilities and Bayes' law, convergence and limit laws, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and maximum likelihood estimation.

This course is exclusively for PhD students at the GSB. This course presents a comprehensive treatment of econometric methods for linear models. Among the topics covered are: the classical linear regression analysis, linear simultaneous equations systems, panel data models, generalized method of moments. This course assumes working knowledge of undergraduate econometrics basic linear algebra, basic probability theory, and statistics that are covered in MGTECON 603. Those who did not take MGTECON 603 or ECON 270 (by Hansen and Hong in the economics department) should see the instructor.

This course will be a first quarter PhD course in microeconomic theory, aimed at PhD students who do not plan to become professional economists. Relative to a course geared to economics PhDs the class will differ in two important ways. First, there will be almost no emphasis on proofs. Second, the topics covered will be broader than the standard set covered in say Econ 202.

Students and faculty review and present recent research papers on basic theories and economic applications of decision theory, game theory and mechanism design. Applications include market design and analyses of incentives and strategic behavior in markets, and selected topics such as auctions, bargaining, contracting, and computation.

This course covers various topics in macroeconomics and is designed to expose students to macroeconomic methods, classic papers in the field, and the latest research at the frontier. The current focus is on economic growth. Using theoretical and empirical tools, we consider questions like: How do we understand long-run growth in per capita income? Why are some countries so much richer than others? Other topics include misallocation as a source of TFP differences, the direction of technical change, growth and the environment, the rise in health spending, patenting, and international trade.nnThis course satisfies the GSB PhD macro requirement.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to current research topics and open issues related to the design and organization of markets. Topics may include: theoretical and empirical analysis of auctions and matching markets; information aggregation in prediction markets and other mechanisms; microstructure of financial markets; e-commerce and novel marketplaces.

This is an advanced game theory course and requires a basic background in game theory or an advanced applied game theory course. The course covers foundational topics such as type spaces, modeling reasoning and rationality, game forms, solution refinements and more. A collection of additional topics will be covered independently via problem solving assignments in workshop style meetings with student presentations.

This course is intended to be an introduction to dynamic political economy theory. We will cover research at the frontier of this field and some useful tools. Tools will be primarily dynamic game theory - including Markov models and models of reputation. Topics covered will include dynamic legislative bargaining, dynamic coalition formation, endogenous institutions, endogenous policy formation, and private politics.

This course meets weekly on Tuesdays at Noon. The primary purpose of the course is to read and discuss current working papers in Industrial Organization and related fields (e.g., Econometrics, Marketing, and Labor). Students are required to present papers a couple of times per quarter and both students and faculty may also present their own working papers.

Each week, a different economics faculty member will discuss his or her important and /or current research. The course is an important introduction to PhD level research topics and techniques. Attendance is mandatory.

This course is offered for students requiring specialized training in an area not covered by existing courses. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the reading.

This course is elected as soon as a student is ready to begin research for the dissertation, usually shortly after admission to candidacy. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the research.

This course completes the first-year sequence in econometrics. The course develops the theoretical and practical aspects of maximum likelihood, quasi-maximum likelihood, GMM and non-linear estimators in detail. The instructor will discuss how these methods are used in practice. Time permitting, we will briefly consider more advanced topics and applications, including: semiparametric, nonparametric estimators and simulation estimators.

This seminar will examine applications of labor economics to business issues and firms' practices. Material will include both theoretical and empirical work, and the syllabus will range from classics in Personnel Economics to current (unpublished) research. Some of the topics to be covered include, but are not limited to, compensation practices, assignment of decision rights, organizational structure, attracting, retaining, and displacing employees, and workplace practices (such as team-based organization, profit sharing, etc.)