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We cover a broad range of topics including objective and subjective performance measurements, relative performance evaluations, relational contracts, and executive compensation. The course relies on business case discussions, rigorous theoretical material, and numerous class activities. To study how people make choices, we need a theory of human decision-making. In our standard economic models, we assume that economic agents are rational and we explore the implications of such rational behavior.
However, the literature in behavioral decision research, which is a study of how people make decisions, shows systematic departures from the rationality assumption.
Behavioral economics question the assumption of perfect rationality and uses insights from psychology and other related fields to improve theoretical insights and empirical predictions of standard economic theory.
The main objective of this course is to introduce students to this rapidly emerging and important field. This course is intended to introduce the process and typical methods in economic benefit-cost analysis.
BCA allows us to determine when project decisions should be made by including consideration of relevant economic aspects. BCA is used to inform government and private decision-making and facilitate more efficient allocation of scarce resources. This course introduces the basic theory and principles of benefit-cost analysis and examines applications of the methodology. Attention is given to such issues as valuing goods and services that are not normally traded in the marketplace e.
Applications are considered in detail. This course is concerned with the economic analysis of industrial markets that are not perfectly competitive. The effects of imperfect competition on firms' decisions pricing, location, advertising, research, and development, among others are reviewed. We begin with a study of optimal pricing policies, including versioning, bundling, and related market segmentation strategies.
In the second part of the course, we apply game theory to the study of oligopoly interaction, focusing on pricing and output strategies in a dynamic setting. Finally, we analyze strategies for firm dominance, especially through the deterrence of potential competition.
The list of such strategies includes capacity expansion, product proliferation, and exclusive dealing contracts. This class analyzes the economics of e-commerce and technology. It will identify the critical features that differentiate the technology firms from traditional industries and examine the implications for business strategy.
The class will discuss topics such as network effects, asymmetric information, price discrimination, and platform markets. To complement the economic theory, we will also consider a case study of various firms throughout the semester.
These have three aims: to provide applications for the concepts developed in the lectures; to inform you about different industries; and to help develop your written, rhetorical, and presentation skills. In the first half of the course, students are introduced to a closed-economy micro-founded, macroeconomic model with a banking system and a central bank. The model is employed to show how central banking shapes equilibrium in the banking system and how banking and central banking help determine employment, output, inflation, and financial market equilibrium beyond the banking system.
Bank lending, interest on bank loans, the money stock, and interbank interest rate are explored in terms of the model. In the second half of the course, students are introduced to a micro-founded, two-country model of international trade, finance, and monetary policy.
The model is employed to explain the joint determination of exchange rate, terms of trade, trade balance, financial flows, interest rates, employment, output, and inflation in the global context under fixed and flexible international exchange rate regimes. Governments forecast economic indicators e. We'll discuss both single-purpose blockchains such as Bitcoin as well as general-purpose implementations. We'll also discuss the architecture of blockchain systems, as well as governance mechanisms used in blockchain management.
As blockchain does not exist in a vacuum, there will be discussion on a number of related topics as well, including blockchain and the law, economics, and finance. Additionally, this course will also provide an overview of blockchain programming, highlighting both existing challenges and specific nuances in blockchain programming.
Students will leave this class with a better understanding of what blockchain technology is, what types of problems are best suited for blockchain-based solutions, as well as a more thorough understanding of the impact that blockchain technology is having across the globe. The course will primarily consist of discussing a set of research papers published in Cryptography conferences over the last few years.
Focus will be on understanding the key ideas and identifying cool new directions or problems for future. The students will be required to read up a paper and give a presentation in the class. The papers will be selected so as to minimize the required background. With the emergence of the internet as a computing platform, distributed applications are being widely deployed by organizations.
Understanding the principles and the technologies underlying distributed computing and distributed systems design is increasingly important. Examples of technologies supporting such deployment include the JEE architecture and the. Net architecture and Web services. This course has three major objectives. First it is designed to introduce students to the principles underlying distributed computing and the architectural design of distributed systems. Second it aims to provide students with the opportunity to exercise these principles in the context of real applications by having the students develop and use technologies such as RESTful Web services, JEE application servers, Hadoop, cryptographic protocols, mobile platforms and blockchains.
Finally it seeks to endow students with the capacity to analyze, design, evaluate, and recommend distributed computing solutions in response to business problems. This course provides a forum for students to consider the relationship between key emerging technologies and the law. In the first half of the course, each session will be dedicated to discussing the legal implications of a particular emerging technology, including autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, stem cell therapy, quantum computing, and 3D printing.
In the second half of the course, we will turn to overarching themes at the intersection of law and technology, including emerging technologies and the law of armed conflict, policing and surveillance, intellectual property, and privacy. Throughout the course, students will be asked to consider whether existing legal frameworks are sufficient to address issues related to emerging technologies. A special seminar devoted to new ideas and new methods in the study of human behavior on the very largest scales.
Emphasis on data science approaches and the analysis of archives, historical and contemporary, as a new arena for the development of new theories and the testing of old ones. Well consider both cognitive models of the individual, and the institutions and social organizations people have created in responsefrom the parliaments of the 18th Century to 20th and 21st Century technologies such as branching bulletin board comment threads and the blockchain.
A major goal of our seminar is for you to ask, and answer, a non-trivial research question with the view towards a peer-reviewed publication. Well use class discussion to answer questions about the reading and to go beyond the assigned papers to speculate, together, on new ways to test their conjectures and claims.
This class will focus on two main areas to help IT leaders succeed: managing the business side of the entity including its people and processes; and managing the technical roles, innovations and implications for the digital business. From a business context, the course will focus on digital business models including eCommerce marketplaces, requirements elicitation for understanding and establishing the needs of internal and external stakeholders, understanding the roles of fulfillment in the current business environment, understanding the difference between SCM and ERP systems to determine advantages and disadvantages of each, and understanding the workings of B2B and P2P markets.
From a technical context, this course will focus on current and emerging immersive technologies such as IoT, ePayment, Blockchain, and Cloud Computing. Additionally, this course will examine IT related changes in the current marketspace through the growth of Internet and mobile commerce, social networking effects on markets, Web 2. Courses dedicated to blockchain A number of the courses listed below have been taught multiple times.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies - Spring, 6 units, CMU Africa Instructors: Martin Saint Rwanda, Kigali This course enables students to understand the complete blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem from users, to miners, to merchants, to industries. Introduction to Cryptography - Spring, 12 units Instructor: Vipul Goyal SCS This course is aimed as an introduction to theoretical cryptography for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.
Large-Scale Social Phenomena - Fall, 12 units Instructor: Simon Dideo Dietrich Social and Decision Sciences A special seminar devoted to new ideas and new methods in the study of human behavior on the very largest scales.
Join us! Is your company or organization interested in working with our researchers on blockchain? Let us know by contacting Michael Lisanti.
We begin with a study of optimal pricing policies, including versioning, bundling, and related market segmentation strategies. In the second part of the course, we apply game theory to the study of oligopoly interaction, focusing on pricing and output strategies in a dynamic setting.
Finally, we analyze strategies for firm dominance, especially through the deterrence of potential competition. The list of such strategies includes capacity expansion, product proliferation, and exclusive dealing contracts. This class analyzes the economics of e-commerce and technology. It will identify the critical features that differentiate the technology firms from traditional industries and examine the implications for business strategy.
The class will discuss topics such as network effects, asymmetric information, price discrimination, and platform markets. To complement the economic theory, we will also consider a case study of various firms throughout the semester. These have three aims: to provide applications for the concepts developed in the lectures; to inform you about different industries; and to help develop your written, rhetorical, and presentation skills.
In the first half of the course, students are introduced to a closed-economy micro-founded, macroeconomic model with a banking system and a central bank.
The model is employed to show how central banking shapes equilibrium in the banking system and how banking and central banking help determine employment, output, inflation, and financial market equilibrium beyond the banking system. Bank lending, interest on bank loans, the money stock, and interbank interest rate are explored in terms of the model.
In the second half of the course, students are introduced to a micro-founded, two-country model of international trade, finance, and monetary policy. The model is employed to explain the joint determination of exchange rate, terms of trade, trade balance, financial flows, interest rates, employment, output, and inflation in the global context under fixed and flexible international exchange rate regimes.
Governments forecast economic indicators e. Accurate forecasts are critical to robust organizational decision-making. This course will introduce students to modern methods for forecasting in economic and business applications.
Topics covered include Bayesian, statistical, and online learning approaches to forecast construction and assessment, univariate and multivariate time series models and algorithms, and principled combination of multiple methods and data sources along with subject matter expertise to improve performance.
Methods will be motivated by applications in macroeconomics, technology, marketing, and finance, with cases drawn from forecasting processes in a variety of business and government organizations. Students will implement forecasting methods in R, including in a real data forecasting competition. Elective Courses After completing our core courses, you will have the essential economics and data analysis skills needed to think through and analyze complex economic, social, and business problems.
Now you will be able to take a deep dive and develop expertise that will allow you to answer questions such as: How should a network of hospitals match donated kidneys to patients?
How should crypto-currency markets be regulated? What auction format should the FCC choose to auction off bandwidth? How can businesses adapt to accelerating technological change and the emergence of new markets in Africa and Asia? What economic policies would best mitigate climate change at the lowest cost? How should Uber design surge pricing strategies? How do political institutions shape economic outcomes?
How do economic outcomes shape political institutions? Core Courses. Professional service broadens one' opportunities to improve their skills and knowledge through practice, helps one to develop networks of high social capital, allows one to experience and explore activities vital to the development of leadership abilities, and promotes awareness about community involvement and social responsibility in one's professional life.
Course topics will expose you to skills that are needed in order to be successful in the real world. BLE will help students assemble their fundamental building blocks in a way that supports their continued development.
The course will continue to emphasize the importance of strong habits, meaningful networks, and ongoing skill development. Students will begin to connect this development with personal and professional goals. In particular, we examine the estimation of the conditional mean of the dependent variable as a function of independent variables using linear regression.
We draw on statistical theory to determine the precision of our estimates and to conduct inference about the population, and we examine a number of applications to business, finance, and economics throughout the course. The curriculum incorporates the latest on innovative behavioral traits and frameworks with a highly experiential format to expose undergraduate students to out of the box thinking. For example, the instructor would use the lecture section of the class to explain the behavioral techniques that lead to innovative solutions based on the Innovator's DNA by Clayton Christensen.
Teams of students each would then examine a problem and be asked to generate 3 potential solutions and a proposed solution, using the techniques presented. Volunteers from the local Carnegie Mellon and entrepreneurial community will serve as mentors and judges, thereby providing a real world learning and networking experience. Ultimately, the best solution will be selected, using a shark tank format.
Weekly format will include one day of lecture and one day of application of the theory introduced in a fun and competitive format. Mathematical optimization techniques have been applied for decades in the context of logistics, supply chain management, and strategic planning, with great success. In recent years, the application of mathematical optimization has penetrated, and in some cases re- defined, many other areas such as the financial service industry, analytical marketing, health care, and web-based businesses.
In this course, the most important methods and techniques underlying mathematical optimization are studied. These include linear programming, integer programming, and nonlinear programming as basic mathematical methodologies. Based on these, we also consider methodologies for particular problem classes such as network models and traveling salesman problems.
During the course we will emphasize mathematical modeling, that is, creating a mathematical description that reflects a given practical problem described in words. Motivated by these mathematical models, we then discuss the necessary mathematical techniques for finding optimal solutions. Lastly, we consider the solution of these problems using optimization software, i.
Prerequisites: or Developing Blockchain Use Case All Semesters: 6 units Blockchains, or distributed ledger and consensus technologies, hold tremendous promise for improving markets and organically handling private, secure data.
As CMU develops its own blockchain and token—-CMU Coin—-a central concern is to determine the set of applications that such technology would be most useful for.
This course is designed for students to propose and, potentially, develop applications or use cases for a campus blockchain. We will examine the market failure Bitcoin was intended to resolve as well as the role of cryptography and distributed systems in enabling this new technology to create societal value.
The course will go on to discuss the boundaries of the role of cryptography in blockchain. Next, we will use these tools to evaluate existing, real-world blockchain use cases with an eye towards developing our own applications of these emerging technologies.
Along the way, we will learn practical development skills in distributed ledger technologies to understand blockchain programming and application development. Finally, students will propose their own blockchain use cases for CMU's own proprietary blockchain. No formal prerequisites, but familiarity with programming is highly recommended.
BLE will continue to build strong personal and professional skills as students get closer to their professional endeavors. Students will be applying learned skills in and out of the classroom and will begin to see the how the assembled skills are beneficial to themselves and others. This course will emphasize the importance of continued broad growth and lifelong learning. Prerequisite: Organizational Behavior Intermittent: 9 units This course examines the factors which influence individual, group and firm behavior in the context of the workplace.
Topics covered include perception, group behavior, decision making, motivation, leadership and organizational design and change. Prerequisites: or or and or and or and or or or or or Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Intermittent: 9 units This course will complement the technical and diagnostic skills you have learned in other courses.
A basic premise of the course is that, while you will need analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, you will also need a broad array of negotiation skills to implement these solutions and make sure that they are truly effective.
Your long-term effectiveness - both in your professional and personal life - is likely to depend on your negotiating abilities. This course will give you the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand the analytical frameworks that underlie negotiations. Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Business, Society and Ethics Intermittent: 9 units This course explores the impact of business on society and society's impact on business.
The external forces affecting business entities include legal requirements and legal rights, community expectations, ethical norms and cultural factors. Prerequisites: or or and or and or and FinTech Intermittent: 9 units The financial services industry is a leader in the use of information technology.
Firms in banking, securities, investments, insurance and financial marketplaces are among the most information intensive and innovative users of technology. The course will examine the role and potential of technology in this industry. The course begins with a description of the financial markets, specifically equity, foreign exchange, and derivatives, and the systems that enable them. It covers the design, evaluation and execution of popular trading strategies that are used by professionals in the various markets.
There is increasing interest, in particular, on systematic trading strategies and execution systems because of their scalability and transparency. The course covers both Algorithmic and High Frequency Trading and analyzes issues regarding latency, scalability, and reliability.
Prerequisite: Business Communications Intermittent: 9 units Business Communications develops and sharpens your written, oral, and interpersonal communication, introducing you to common forms of professional writing and speaking in specific business situations.
The course explores crucial rhetorical issues that impact your ability to communicate and achieve your objectives as a business leader. Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Team Dynamics and Leadership Intermittent: 9 units Organizations have greatly expanded their use of teams to accomplish a wide variety of objectives. Teams develop new products, provide professional services, and start new businesses. Temporary teams are frequently assembled to make difficult decisions, solve cross-functional problems, and generate new ideas.
Advances in communication technology allow people dispersed across the globe to collaborate virtually, creating many new opportunities and challenges for leaders of such teams. This course will provide you the knowledge and skills to communicate in teams and to lead them effectively. It will help you better communicate in and lead teams and organizations. You will learn both effective leadership practices as well as how to avoid common leadership mistakes. Our readings reflect both the scientific and practice literatures and class exercises, cases, and projects provide the opportunity to apply what you learn.
It provides an intellectual framework for understanding other cultures and eventually one's own , as well as detailed studies of particular countries. It discusses how culture defines organizations, contracts, personal relationships, attitudes toward authority, time and space, ethics, wealth, and subcultures, and how these affect business. Student teams study a culture of their choice and make presentations, based on interviews and literature research.
Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Business Presentations Intermittent: 9 units In this course, students prepare, present, discuss, and critique different oral presentations currently practiced in business. Topics include developing your presence in a professional setting; projecting credibility, professionalism, and authority; and planning presentations to influence business audiences. Assignments and cases will cover informative and persuasive presentations, which will vary from term to term and may include talks such as product pitches, team-driven strategic plans, and state-of-the-company addresses.
Prerequisites: or Cross-Cultural Business Communications Intermittent: 9 units This course considers cultural behaviors, assumptions, values, and conflicts surrounding business communication across cultures. It will begin with an evolving definition of "culture" and consider several cultural variables that may affect communicative success i. Students will research and present findings on the characteristics of specific cultures.
They will prepare business documents and presentations that build on the knowledge and skills acquired in , Business Communication, and reflect new sensitivities to the needs of specific cross-cultural audiences. This course is offered only at the Carnegie Mellon-Qatar campus. Prerequisites: or or Acting for Business Intermittent: 9 units Perception may or may not be Reality.
But Perception is, in fact, what Influences people. The course will address the foundations of regulation why regulate? Portions of the course will tackle relatively broad questions such as: Why regulate? What is the law of unintended consequences? What is the objective of a policy advocate? Are regulators and regulatory policies a systemic risk?
Are our markets rigged? How can regulators enhance the predictability and credibility of their policies? How costly were government guarantees during the financial crisis? Should we bar insider trading? Should regulations be determined and motivated based upon cost-benefit analysis?
How can we evaluate the success or failure of particular regulations and whether they have achieved their objectives? How does the Dodd-Frank Act promote financial stability?
What basic aspects of the financial crisis did Dodd-Frank not address? Lecture, 3 hours. Minimum grade standard of "C" applies only to economics courses. The topics include constitutional sources of business law, administrative agencies, contract law, agency, employment, business forms corporations, partnerships, limited partnerships, limited liability companies, agency arrangements, franchises , intellectual property and unfair competition, legal liability of professionals, international trade and antitrust.
Prerequisites: or or or and or and or and International Trade and International Law Intermittent: 9 units The course discusses the international legal system and laws that affect international trade. It covers the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, treaties and concessions, shipping and customs, appointment of foreign sales agents, resolution of trade disputes, international mergers and joint ventures, international competition law, UN sales convention, international trade organizations IMF, WTO, World Bank, etc.
Prerequisites: or Intellectual Property and E-Commerce Intermittent: 6 units The course is intended to instruct students on the creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web, including the creation of the Domain Naming System. The course will provide an understanding of how the WWW "Web" operates from its creation to the present , how the laws of various contries interact with the Web; how issues of privacy are addressed and the role of private parties and government in monitoring privacy.
The course will examine how intellectual property is created and protected; who owns the property; and the role of ownership of the intellectual property interacts with antitrust laws.
Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Operations Management Fall and Spring: 9 units This course is an introduction to production and operations management that covers both manufacturing and services.
It deals with strategic issues design of flexible supply , planning issues capacity management , and operational issues inventory management and information. The linkage between strategy and tactics will be emphasized. The students will learn concepts and tools that will help them to manage from the "boardroom" to the "toolroom. The recent explosion in large-scale high-resolution data enables managers to ask and answer questions regarding businesses and consumers at a whole new level.
Managers are faced with data about businesses and consumers that are growing faster than they can be utilized. Data mining enables business to extract useful consumer behavior and preferences from seemingly tremendous and unorganized data, which then can be utilized for data-driven decision-making and competitive advantage.
Applications can be found in e-commerce, sales, marketing, finance, operations, etc. In this hands-on introductory class, you will learn the basic concepts and techniques of data mining in addition to when and how they can be applied to improve many aspects of business and consumers' welfare. Throughout the course, we will use R, a powerful open-source statistical language and one of the main tools in data mining and business analytics, fast becoming a mainstream tool.
Prerequisites: or or Energy Systems Fall: 9 units This course will provide students with an understanding of the systems and markets that provide energy to businesses and consumers. Students will be introduced to the sources and uses of energy, and how they have evolved and the possible paths over which they may evolve in the next decades.
The course places an emphasis on electric energy, the single largest energy source in many industrial economies, but also covers natural gas, oil, and selected other primary energy sources.
Students will learn the energy flows in the USA and the world, as well as the business-relevant characteristics of the engineered systems that provide the energy in various forms.
Both traditional and emerging energy sources will be discussed, and students will understand the difference between an energy carrier and an energy source. We will also discuss some of the issues that arise without proper management of the physical risks of energy systems.
Students will learn some of the history of electric power regulation and the inconsistent subsidy structures that have provided opportunities and challenges for energy companies and investors, including discussion of how emissions restrictions affect fuel, engineering, investment, and project finance choices.
The history of electric power markets will be discussed, with an eye to examining the opportunities that market changes create for business.
Topics include an analysis of the economic and psychological factors influencing buyer behavior, marketing research, market segmentation, and the development of marketing programs new product, price, advertising and distribution decisions. Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Consumer Behavior Intermittent: 9 units Marketing, in particular, begins and ends with the consumer from determining consumer needs to ensuring customer satisfaction. In this course, we will explore the most recent scientific research in marketing, psychology, and behavioral economics on judgment and decision-making.
We will develop your ability to understand and influence what people want, how people decide what and when to buy, and whether people will be satisfied or dissatisfied with their decisions. These psychological insights are particularly useful for marketing strategy, brand positioning, and marketing communication decisions, but also yield insight into common biases in judgment and decision making, beyond marketing, to which you would otherwise fall prey.
We will discuss some of these applications in class. In addition, we will examine the methodology of market research specific to consumer behavior to build the tools you will need to interpret and base decisions on it.
Prerequisite: Applied Behavioral Decision Making For Business Intermittent: 6 units This course is intended to give future managers, consultants, and policy makers an introduction to the insights and applications of behavioral decision making.
Behavioral decision making is the interdisciplinary study of how people make decisions. It draws together research from psychology, economics, political science, and management, among other fields. Topics include heuristics and biases in inference and prediction, risk perceptions and attitudes, and the roles of group and emotional processes in decision making.
In this course we will address applications of these findings from the various behavioral sciences to the study of business. Prerequisites: or or and Finance Intermittent: 9 units Firms create value by making good investment decisions. Finance is the field of management science tasked with making this happen.
It is a set of tools with which firms identify good investments and decide how to pay for them. Paying for them ultimately involves getting money from households. Therefore, finance also describes the investment decisions of households and the resulting allocation of the economy's resources across firms and time.
This course is the introductory finance course in the undergraduate business program. Time permitting, the course will also provide an introduction to option markets and derivative securities.
Upon completing the course a student will be able to consider a large and complex business problem, make some assumptions, structure the firms' cash flows in a spreadsheet, calculate the value of different solutions to the problem, and make a decision.
Prerequisites: or and or or or or or Funding Entrepreneurial Ventures Intermittent: 9 units So you want to do a startup and you know that you need funding. There are multiple ways to fund a new venture: bootstrapping, economic development, angels, venture capitalists. The question is what are these funders looking for in an early stage investment? What is important to them? How do they decide which companies to invest in and which not? This class looks at funding from the funder's point of view and provides the student with a framework of the investment process: investment criteria, sourcing, selection, due diligence, deal structure, valuation, post investment involvement.
Real companies seeking funding are used for the final project in which students will be expected, as investment teams, to make investment decisions and convince their fellow investors the class to join them or not. This is a highly interactive and project class.
There will be multiple guest speakers. Topics covered include: exchange rate determination and quoting, international parity relations, foreign exchange hedging strategies using forwards and options, foreign exchange exposure management, international bond market, currency swap market, global equity market, international portfolio risk assessment and performance measurement. Students develop problem solving and communication skills with presentations and critical discussions of case studies.
Prerequisite: Management Game Intermittent: 12 units This course is designed to integrate the managerial concepts and techniques studied earlier in the curriculum and to focus on elements of organizational structure and behavior.
Student teams assume the role of top management of firms competing in an international economy simulated by the Carnegie Mellon University Management Game. Each team is responsible to a Board of Directors comprised of alumni of the MBA program and business masters students. Emphasis is placed on the development and implementation of sound organizational decision structures as well as the formulation of effective competitive strategies.
The course is reserved for senior-year business majors and additional majors. Prerequisites: and and and Advanced Business Communications: Power, Persuasion, and Problem-solving All Semesters: 9 units Challenges such as communicating leadership and expertise to a newly formed team, receiving unclear expectations, limited time to complete a complex problem, persuading a reluctant colleague, showcasing yourself in a crucial performance review all occur in business.
This advanced course digs deeper into how leaders and successful professionals navigate the complex workplace of surprise, ambiguity, crisis, and diversity. You'll explore varied, often high-stakes workplace scenarios to build your persuasive ability, linguistic skill, communicative flexibility, agility, and confidence. Prerequisites: and or Introduction to Entrepreneurship Intermittent: 9 units This course is an introductory course designed to provide an overview of entrepreneurship, develop an entrepreneurial frame of mind and learn the fundamentals of lean start up development.
Students, Sophomore year or higher, interested in founding or contributing to a start-up venture, regardless of areas of discipline engineering, design, business, computer science, music, drama and more , are welcome.
Students can expect to gain a basic understanding of functional areas such as customer discovery, sales, business planning, risk management, venture funding, and more.
This class also features "The Apprentice Experience" that affords the students the opportunity to develop, produce and sell a product in a real world and competitive environment. The class is structured in a lecture, followed by applied workshop format.
Students will be learning the fundamental tools required for any start up and then applying said tools and techniques to analyze and execute real world business opportunities.
Interdisciplinary teams will generate ideas and explore their potential as viable businesses. Numerous student teams have completed this class with real world opportunities. Lectures, guest speakers, case studies, and exercises will also be integrated. Students pull together all the ideas and information from different functional aspects of their projects into coherent and persuasive mini-business plans that serve as roadmaps for building their businesses; and useful instruments to find sufficient financing for the new ventures, so that they can convince the outside world that these opportunities are viable, with substantial potential for success.
Prerequisites: or or Min. An essential topic in the course is the measurement and allocation of costs to assist decision making in organizations. The course covers standard topics in cost accounting, such as cost behavior and relevant costs, and connect these to broader issues in microeconomics, decision theory, corporate finance, and operations management. Classes contain a mixture of conventional lectures, problem solving, business cases, and simulations.
Prerequisites: and or or or Technology-Based Entrepreneurship Spring: 9 units This course is offered only at Carnegie Mellon's campus in Qatar. This course is designed as an introduction to entrepreneurship and basic business concepts for engineering and science students. There are no prerequisites.
Students learn basic business concepts, business models, entrepreneurial thinking, idea generation, opportunity recognition, and the basics of accounting, marketing and strategy development. There is no final examination. Instead, students, working in teams, generate an original idea for a startup business and prepare a business plan and an investor presentation, which sets forth the basic strategies, business models and evaluates the opportunity afforded by their original idea.
This course also is consistent with the broad mission of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar's entrepreneurship program, which is described below. The broad mission of the entrepreneurship program at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar is three-pronged: a. To encourage and develop entrepreneurial and innovative thinking in a business setting, whether or not it is a startup company; b.
To obtain the basic skills to start a new venture; c. To stimulate self-evaluation for life direction. The course is aimed at anyone whose career might involve working with accounting and other financial data, and should be especially useful for those interested in consulting and financial analysis. Throughout the semester we will discuss the key disclosure rules in the United States, the communication methods available to managers, managers' incentives and ability to exert discretion over reported earnings, and the interplay between a company's corporate strategy and its financial reporting policies and practices.
The main goal of the course is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of how financial reports provide unusually specific and detailed but not perfect information about certain risks and performance of these financial institutions. Their financial statements increasingly are based on fair value accounting and their financial reports include increasingly extensive risk and estimation sensitivity disclosures.
Both fair value accounting and risk and estimation sensitivity disclosures are necessary ingredients for financial reports to convey financial institutions' risk and performance in today's world of complex, structured, value and risk partitioning financial instruments and transactions. While financial institutions often report imperfect or worse fair value measurements and risk and estimation sensitivity disclosures, careful joint analysis of the information they do provide invariably yields important clues about their risks and performance.
While this course is most relevant to students interested in financial institutions, much of the accounting material also pertains to a varying extent to other types of firms. For example, many firms securitize their accounts receivable or hedge their commodity, interest rate, or foreign exchange risk using derivatives. Prerequisites: and Financial Statement Analysis Intermittent: 9 units This course is about fundamental analysis using financial statements.
We develop and apply technologies for understanding and identifying firm activities that generate shareholder value and for developing valuation benchmarks. The ultimate goal of such analysis is to aid the security valuation and risk analysis exercises. This course is intended to help students establish a good foundation and introduce students the basics of equity and debt analysis techniques.
Taking Finance before this course is recommended, though not a formal prerequisite. Prerequisite: Accounting for Financial Institutions Fall: 9 units The banking sector is important because it drives the financial growth of an economy. This sector accepts deposits from the public and issues loans, and thus the banking sector expands in response to positive changes in retail, corporate and government business demand. Similarly, if a slowdown occurs this results in a reduction in demand for banking sector services.
As a result, the important starting point for a financial analyst, who wants to assess current and future economic growth, are the financial statements of banks and the information they contain.
To extract this information, however, requires being able to read and interpret the financial statements of a bank. These statements are very different from reading traditional corporate financial statements. As a result, the first objective of this course is to learn how to read financial statements generated from the banking sector including how to interpret and evaluate these statements. The banking sector in Qatar is unique because it has two important and separate subsectors —- Islamic and conventional banking.
Each of these subsectors have a different banking business model which in turn generate differences in their financial statements. As a result a second important objective for this course is to learn how to read and evaluate the financial statements from each of these subsectors. Prerequisite: International Management Intermittent: 9 units This course uses the case method to examine the strategic and operational issues in management practice and decision-making that are important in operating a business that spans national borders.
Topics include political and economic risk assessment, technology transfer, cultural analysis, negotiation, social responsibility, organization structure, supply chain management and trends in foreign direct investment and their impact on developing strategies for entering and becoming successful in international markets. The course examines why some organizations are better than others at learning from experience and developing new knowledge.
The course focuses on how organizations innovate or create new knowledge, how they retain knowledge, and how they transfer knowledge throughout enterprises.
Strategic implications of new results on organizational learning and knowledge management are also developed. Students will acquire a greater appreciation of the dynamics of organizations and factors contributing to their successful performance. A mix of lectures, cases and exercises are used to increase your ability to create, retain and transfer knowledge effectively in organizations.
Prerequisites: or or or or or or Commercialization and Innovation Intermittent: 9 units The course is targeted at entrepreneurs and innovators who are interested in introducing innovations to the marketplace through start-up, emerging and established organizations.
Class participants will learn how to evaluate, develop and implement opportunities for innovation, using an emergent or iterative approach the lean methodology. Students will also learn a variety of methodologies to identify opportunities for innovation including how to identify unserved customers, identifying what jobs customers need to do, and how to incorporate innovations originating from end users, suppliers, materials manufacturers, and other entities outside the firm.
The course is divided into two parts. In the first half students will be exposed to theories and strategies of innovation through readings and case studies. In the second half students will identify and develop their own product concept utilizing concepts developed in the first part of the course, and step-by-step develop their business model, organizational plan, strategic partners, marketing message, sales plan, and financing strategy. Prerequisites: or and or or or or or Corporate Strategy Intermittent: 9 units This course is designed to provide the student with a general management perspective and an understanding of the total business enterprise.
It builds upon previous course work in functional areas and provides insights and analytical tools which a general manager should have in order to plan and implement successful business strategy. The student will analyze complex business problems and formulate realistic strategic solutions. This is a hands-on class where you will use real world data, case studies and participation in Google online marketing challenge.
The following topics would be covered in detail: a Search Engine Optimization - you will learn how search engines, keyword auctions, and search engine marketing work, and how to optimize your pay per click advertisement efforts; b Econo-Mining - you will also learn on how firms are getting or can get useful information from user generated content using text mining and opinion mining capabilities to drive their product development, placement and advertisement decisions.
Using real world data you will analyze whether the traditional approaches for driving advertising or product development strategy are in alignment with what you learn from user generated content; c Social Media Marketing - you will learn how to design a social media marketing campaign.
What are the key ingredients that make such campaigns successful? How do you run a campaign for a viral product; d Forecasting Demand Using Publicly Available Online Search Data - you will learn how to build better forecasting models for demand using Google search data Google Trends and Insights ; e Wisdom of the Crowds: we will cover how to design crowdsourcing contests, what and how to crowdsource.
You will also learn what prediction markets are, how they work, how to design them, when prediction markets are successful and what kinds of questions are best suited for prediction markets. Teams of five to six students are given a client to engage with for the semester on a specific consulting project assignment. Students will learn about the challenges of the multi-dimensional and complex issues faced by managers, including learning the concepts and skills to handle ambiguity, perform a persuasive data analysis, and communicate the findings effectively.
Students will develop a deeper understanding of how organizations can co-ordinate and leverage synergies across a range of disciplines by effective deployment of technologies and organizational structures and processes.
Teams will have an opportunity to work with clients on a wide mix of problems spanning multiple functions, including strategy, operations, technology and marketing. Specifically, teams will address issues such as big data, mobile application strategies, supply chain, digital media, complexity management, health care delivery models and healthcare marketing strategy.
Regular meetings with the instructor will be scheduled to guide teams during client engagement and co-ordinate with the executives at their client company. No classes to attend, but weekly team meetings with times to be determined. The course is for undergraduate seniors only, and enrollment is by special permission. Prerequisites: and and Social, Economic and Information Networks Spring: 9 units Interaction is a fundamental part of social science: firms market products to consumers, people share opinions and information with their friends, workers collaborate on projects, agents form alliances and coalitions.
In this course, we will use the emerging field of social networks to put structure on this diverse mass of connections. Using a mixture of theoretical, empirical, and computational methods, we will learn about the structure and function of social networks. We will look at how an individual's position in a social network reflects her role in the community. We will learn to identify tastemakers and trendsetters by looking at how information moves through our increasingly connected society.
We will consider how our own position in the social network affects our behavior, opinions, and outcomes. And we will explore where social networks come from, and what affects their structure. The material in this course will be interdisciplinary, drawn from the fields of math, computer science, physics, sociology, political science, and economics.
By the end of the course, you will have the tools and knowledge needed to analyze social networks on your own.
The course is capped with a project where you will use your skills to answer your own questions. Prerequisites: or Min. In doing so you will develop your 'intellectual toolbox' for business technologies consulting by learning to apply specific tools and techniques such as BPMN and Agile development methodologies.
You will practice applying these techniques on a variety of case studies, examples, and a substantial semester-long project.
Beyond the concrete analysis and design techniques, you will develop a set of work practices and habits of thought that should serve you well in your consulting career.
This will be a very hands-on course in which you will largely learn by doing. Most class sessions will include a combination of some presentation by the instructor, some discussion possibly of a case study , and exercises to practice working with the day's tools and concepts.
Homework assignments, in-class presentations, and a semester-long term project are essential parts of the course. Prerequisites: or Modern Data Management Intermittent: 9 units Data drives modern business.
Transactional data systems keep the world's economy operating smoothly by tracking and processing the movement of bits, money, atoms, and attention across the planet.
Analytic systems help managers understand and optimize their businesses. Robotic systems both physical machines and software bots are automating a tremendous amount of the work that has historically been done by people. In this course you will learn to use a set of data management tools to capture, manage, analyze, and understand data so to help your organization do business better, faster, and cheaper.
We will discuss the benefits and limitations of different models and follow a practical spreadsheet-based approach to provide hands-on experience with Excel Solver. The course will build on the knowledge you have gained from the prerequisite courses; we will develop your model-building skills, explore some technique-oriented skills such as linear, integer, and nonlinear programming, and experiment with heuristic solution methods.
While going through different models and techniques, we will also see real-world examples of how these models are actually used in practical business environments. Prerequisites: or or Uncertainty and Risk Modeling Intermittent: 9 units This is a hands-on course on modeling and simulation of business systems under uncertainty. It takes the perspective of the consultant whose job is to analyze existing or potential business processes and provide recommendations for managerial decision-making.
Recognizing that most businesses are subject to high levels of variability, risk and uncertainty, it will adopt a stochastic approach to characterize the behavior of business systems and processes, and explore the effects of alternative decisions in this context. Two modeling methodologies will be covered: i stochastic modeling, and ii stochastic simulation. Examples are drawn from different managerial domains, such as supply chain management, risk management, marketing, and project management.
The lectures, homework assignments, exam and term project will focus on modeling, computational, and analytical skills. Computational implementations will be done in Excel using the Risk add-in during the first half of the course to build simple simulation models and the Arena software during the second half of the course to build more complex models based on discrete-event simulation.
Course objectives: 1. Recognize uncertainty in business systems and processes, and their impact on managerial decisions e. Model uncertainty and risk quantitatively using probabilistic tools 3. Specify probabilistic distributions for inputs from available data 4.
Generate probabilistic distributions for outputs and relevant performance metrics e. Develop computational models to simulate complex stochastic processes using appropriate software 6. Communicate outputs of uncertainty analyses and implications for managerial decision- making. Prerequisites: or or or or or Technology Strategy Intermittent: 9 units This course is about business strategy for technology-intensive industries.
Examples of such industries are computer hardware and software, media and entertainment, telecommunications and e-commerce. We will explore the unique economic circumstances facing firms in these industries and identify strategies that enable firms to succeed given these circumstances. You will learn to analyze pricing strategies including versioning and bundling; product standardization decisions; managing product complements; exploiting network effects; managing platform competition.
This course will help you understand the unique economic characteristics seen in today's technology-intensive markets and how they impact the strategic interactions among firms and consumers. We will study, for example: Why firms in the IT industry give away their best products for free.
Why makers of video gaming consoles subsidize end users but tax game developers while computer operating system makers subsidize software developers but overcharge end users.
B.S. Degree in Business Administration
This course will provide you the knowledge and skills to communicate in teams and to lead them effectively. It will help you better communicate in and lead teams and organizations. You will learn both effective leadership practices as well as how to avoid common leadership mistakes.
Our readings reflect both the scientific and practice literatures and class exercises, cases, and projects provide the opportunity to apply what you learn. It provides an intellectual framework for understanding other cultures and eventually one's own , as well as detailed studies of particular countries. It discusses how culture defines organizations, contracts, personal relationships, attitudes toward authority, time and space, ethics, wealth, and subcultures, and how these affect business.
Student teams study a culture of their choice and make presentations, based on interviews and literature research.
Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Business Presentations Intermittent: 9 units In this course, students prepare, present, discuss, and critique different oral presentations currently practiced in business.
Topics include developing your presence in a professional setting; projecting credibility, professionalism, and authority; and planning presentations to influence business audiences. Assignments and cases will cover informative and persuasive presentations, which will vary from term to term and may include talks such as product pitches, team-driven strategic plans, and state-of-the-company addresses. Prerequisites: or Cross-Cultural Business Communications Intermittent: 9 units This course considers cultural behaviors, assumptions, values, and conflicts surrounding business communication across cultures.
It will begin with an evolving definition of "culture" and consider several cultural variables that may affect communicative success i. Students will research and present findings on the characteristics of specific cultures. They will prepare business documents and presentations that build on the knowledge and skills acquired in , Business Communication, and reflect new sensitivities to the needs of specific cross-cultural audiences.
This course is offered only at the Carnegie Mellon-Qatar campus. Prerequisites: or or Acting for Business Intermittent: 9 units Perception may or may not be Reality. But Perception is, in fact, what Influences people. The course will address the foundations of regulation why regulate?
Portions of the course will tackle relatively broad questions such as: Why regulate? What is the law of unintended consequences? What is the objective of a policy advocate? Are regulators and regulatory policies a systemic risk? Are our markets rigged?
How can regulators enhance the predictability and credibility of their policies? How costly were government guarantees during the financial crisis? Should we bar insider trading? Should regulations be determined and motivated based upon cost-benefit analysis?
How can we evaluate the success or failure of particular regulations and whether they have achieved their objectives? How does the Dodd-Frank Act promote financial stability? What basic aspects of the financial crisis did Dodd-Frank not address? Lecture, 3 hours. Minimum grade standard of "C" applies only to economics courses.
The topics include constitutional sources of business law, administrative agencies, contract law, agency, employment, business forms corporations, partnerships, limited partnerships, limited liability companies, agency arrangements, franchises , intellectual property and unfair competition, legal liability of professionals, international trade and antitrust. Prerequisites: or or or and or and or and International Trade and International Law Intermittent: 9 units The course discusses the international legal system and laws that affect international trade.
It covers the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, treaties and concessions, shipping and customs, appointment of foreign sales agents, resolution of trade disputes, international mergers and joint ventures, international competition law, UN sales convention, international trade organizations IMF, WTO, World Bank, etc. Prerequisites: or Intellectual Property and E-Commerce Intermittent: 6 units The course is intended to instruct students on the creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web, including the creation of the Domain Naming System.
The course will provide an understanding of how the WWW "Web" operates from its creation to the present , how the laws of various contries interact with the Web; how issues of privacy are addressed and the role of private parties and government in monitoring privacy.
The course will examine how intellectual property is created and protected; who owns the property; and the role of ownership of the intellectual property interacts with antitrust laws.
Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Operations Management Fall and Spring: 9 units This course is an introduction to production and operations management that covers both manufacturing and services. It deals with strategic issues design of flexible supply , planning issues capacity management , and operational issues inventory management and information. The linkage between strategy and tactics will be emphasized.
The students will learn concepts and tools that will help them to manage from the "boardroom" to the "toolroom. The recent explosion in large-scale high-resolution data enables managers to ask and answer questions regarding businesses and consumers at a whole new level.
Managers are faced with data about businesses and consumers that are growing faster than they can be utilized. Data mining enables business to extract useful consumer behavior and preferences from seemingly tremendous and unorganized data, which then can be utilized for data-driven decision-making and competitive advantage.
Applications can be found in e-commerce, sales, marketing, finance, operations, etc. In this hands-on introductory class, you will learn the basic concepts and techniques of data mining in addition to when and how they can be applied to improve many aspects of business and consumers' welfare. Throughout the course, we will use R, a powerful open-source statistical language and one of the main tools in data mining and business analytics, fast becoming a mainstream tool.
Prerequisites: or or Energy Systems Fall: 9 units This course will provide students with an understanding of the systems and markets that provide energy to businesses and consumers. Students will be introduced to the sources and uses of energy, and how they have evolved and the possible paths over which they may evolve in the next decades. The course places an emphasis on electric energy, the single largest energy source in many industrial economies, but also covers natural gas, oil, and selected other primary energy sources.
Students will learn the energy flows in the USA and the world, as well as the business-relevant characteristics of the engineered systems that provide the energy in various forms.
Both traditional and emerging energy sources will be discussed, and students will understand the difference between an energy carrier and an energy source. We will also discuss some of the issues that arise without proper management of the physical risks of energy systems. Students will learn some of the history of electric power regulation and the inconsistent subsidy structures that have provided opportunities and challenges for energy companies and investors, including discussion of how emissions restrictions affect fuel, engineering, investment, and project finance choices.
The history of electric power markets will be discussed, with an eye to examining the opportunities that market changes create for business. Topics include an analysis of the economic and psychological factors influencing buyer behavior, marketing research, market segmentation, and the development of marketing programs new product, price, advertising and distribution decisions.
Prerequisites: or or and or and or and Consumer Behavior Intermittent: 9 units Marketing, in particular, begins and ends with the consumer from determining consumer needs to ensuring customer satisfaction. In this course, we will explore the most recent scientific research in marketing, psychology, and behavioral economics on judgment and decision-making.
We will develop your ability to understand and influence what people want, how people decide what and when to buy, and whether people will be satisfied or dissatisfied with their decisions. These psychological insights are particularly useful for marketing strategy, brand positioning, and marketing communication decisions, but also yield insight into common biases in judgment and decision making, beyond marketing, to which you would otherwise fall prey. We will discuss some of these applications in class.
In addition, we will examine the methodology of market research specific to consumer behavior to build the tools you will need to interpret and base decisions on it.
Prerequisite: Applied Behavioral Decision Making For Business Intermittent: 6 units This course is intended to give future managers, consultants, and policy makers an introduction to the insights and applications of behavioral decision making. Behavioral decision making is the interdisciplinary study of how people make decisions. It draws together research from psychology, economics, political science, and management, among other fields.
Topics include heuristics and biases in inference and prediction, risk perceptions and attitudes, and the roles of group and emotional processes in decision making. In this course we will address applications of these findings from the various behavioral sciences to the study of business.
Prerequisites: or or and Finance Intermittent: 9 units Firms create value by making good investment decisions. Finance is the field of management science tasked with making this happen. It is a set of tools with which firms identify good investments and decide how to pay for them. Paying for them ultimately involves getting money from households. Therefore, finance also describes the investment decisions of households and the resulting allocation of the economy's resources across firms and time.
This course is the introductory finance course in the undergraduate business program. Time permitting, the course will also provide an introduction to option markets and derivative securities.
Upon completing the course a student will be able to consider a large and complex business problem, make some assumptions, structure the firms' cash flows in a spreadsheet, calculate the value of different solutions to the problem, and make a decision. Prerequisites: or and or or or or or Funding Entrepreneurial Ventures Intermittent: 9 units So you want to do a startup and you know that you need funding. There are multiple ways to fund a new venture: bootstrapping, economic development, angels, venture capitalists.
The question is what are these funders looking for in an early stage investment? What is important to them? How do they decide which companies to invest in and which not? This class looks at funding from the funder's point of view and provides the student with a framework of the investment process: investment criteria, sourcing, selection, due diligence, deal structure, valuation, post investment involvement. Real companies seeking funding are used for the final project in which students will be expected, as investment teams, to make investment decisions and convince their fellow investors the class to join them or not.
This is a highly interactive and project class. There will be multiple guest speakers. Topics covered include: exchange rate determination and quoting, international parity relations, foreign exchange hedging strategies using forwards and options, foreign exchange exposure management, international bond market, currency swap market, global equity market, international portfolio risk assessment and performance measurement.
Students develop problem solving and communication skills with presentations and critical discussions of case studies. Prerequisite: Management Game Intermittent: 12 units This course is designed to integrate the managerial concepts and techniques studied earlier in the curriculum and to focus on elements of organizational structure and behavior.
Student teams assume the role of top management of firms competing in an international economy simulated by the Carnegie Mellon University Management Game. Each team is responsible to a Board of Directors comprised of alumni of the MBA program and business masters students.
Emphasis is placed on the development and implementation of sound organizational decision structures as well as the formulation of effective competitive strategies. The course is reserved for senior-year business majors and additional majors.
Prerequisites: and and and Advanced Business Communications: Power, Persuasion, and Problem-solving All Semesters: 9 units Challenges such as communicating leadership and expertise to a newly formed team, receiving unclear expectations, limited time to complete a complex problem, persuading a reluctant colleague, showcasing yourself in a crucial performance review all occur in business. This advanced course digs deeper into how leaders and successful professionals navigate the complex workplace of surprise, ambiguity, crisis, and diversity.
You'll explore varied, often high-stakes workplace scenarios to build your persuasive ability, linguistic skill, communicative flexibility, agility, and confidence. Prerequisites: and or Introduction to Entrepreneurship Intermittent: 9 units This course is an introductory course designed to provide an overview of entrepreneurship, develop an entrepreneurial frame of mind and learn the fundamentals of lean start up development.
Students, Sophomore year or higher, interested in founding or contributing to a start-up venture, regardless of areas of discipline engineering, design, business, computer science, music, drama and more , are welcome.
Students can expect to gain a basic understanding of functional areas such as customer discovery, sales, business planning, risk management, venture funding, and more. This class also features "The Apprentice Experience" that affords the students the opportunity to develop, produce and sell a product in a real world and competitive environment.
The class is structured in a lecture, followed by applied workshop format. Students will be learning the fundamental tools required for any start up and then applying said tools and techniques to analyze and execute real world business opportunities.
Interdisciplinary teams will generate ideas and explore their potential as viable businesses. Numerous student teams have completed this class with real world opportunities. Lectures, guest speakers, case studies, and exercises will also be integrated. Students pull together all the ideas and information from different functional aspects of their projects into coherent and persuasive mini-business plans that serve as roadmaps for building their businesses; and useful instruments to find sufficient financing for the new ventures, so that they can convince the outside world that these opportunities are viable, with substantial potential for success.
Prerequisites: or or Min. An essential topic in the course is the measurement and allocation of costs to assist decision making in organizations. The course covers standard topics in cost accounting, such as cost behavior and relevant costs, and connect these to broader issues in microeconomics, decision theory, corporate finance, and operations management. Classes contain a mixture of conventional lectures, problem solving, business cases, and simulations.
Prerequisites: and or or or Technology-Based Entrepreneurship Spring: 9 units This course is offered only at Carnegie Mellon's campus in Qatar. This course is designed as an introduction to entrepreneurship and basic business concepts for engineering and science students.
There are no prerequisites. Students learn basic business concepts, business models, entrepreneurial thinking, idea generation, opportunity recognition, and the basics of accounting, marketing and strategy development. There is no final examination. Instead, students, working in teams, generate an original idea for a startup business and prepare a business plan and an investor presentation, which sets forth the basic strategies, business models and evaluates the opportunity afforded by their original idea.
This course also is consistent with the broad mission of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar's entrepreneurship program, which is described below. The broad mission of the entrepreneurship program at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar is three-pronged: a. To encourage and develop entrepreneurial and innovative thinking in a business setting, whether or not it is a startup company; b.
To obtain the basic skills to start a new venture; c. To stimulate self-evaluation for life direction. The course is aimed at anyone whose career might involve working with accounting and other financial data, and should be especially useful for those interested in consulting and financial analysis. Throughout the semester we will discuss the key disclosure rules in the United States, the communication methods available to managers, managers' incentives and ability to exert discretion over reported earnings, and the interplay between a company's corporate strategy and its financial reporting policies and practices.
The main goal of the course is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of how financial reports provide unusually specific and detailed but not perfect information about certain risks and performance of these financial institutions.
Their financial statements increasingly are based on fair value accounting and their financial reports include increasingly extensive risk and estimation sensitivity disclosures. Both fair value accounting and risk and estimation sensitivity disclosures are necessary ingredients for financial reports to convey financial institutions' risk and performance in today's world of complex, structured, value and risk partitioning financial instruments and transactions.
While financial institutions often report imperfect or worse fair value measurements and risk and estimation sensitivity disclosures, careful joint analysis of the information they do provide invariably yields important clues about their risks and performance.
While this course is most relevant to students interested in financial institutions, much of the accounting material also pertains to a varying extent to other types of firms. For example, many firms securitize their accounts receivable or hedge their commodity, interest rate, or foreign exchange risk using derivatives.
Prerequisites: and Financial Statement Analysis Intermittent: 9 units This course is about fundamental analysis using financial statements. We develop and apply technologies for understanding and identifying firm activities that generate shareholder value and for developing valuation benchmarks.
The ultimate goal of such analysis is to aid the security valuation and risk analysis exercises. This course is intended to help students establish a good foundation and introduce students the basics of equity and debt analysis techniques. Taking Finance before this course is recommended, though not a formal prerequisite. Prerequisite: Accounting for Financial Institutions Fall: 9 units The banking sector is important because it drives the financial growth of an economy.
This sector accepts deposits from the public and issues loans, and thus the banking sector expands in response to positive changes in retail, corporate and government business demand.
Similarly, if a slowdown occurs this results in a reduction in demand for banking sector services. As a result, the important starting point for a financial analyst, who wants to assess current and future economic growth, are the financial statements of banks and the information they contain.
To extract this information, however, requires being able to read and interpret the financial statements of a bank. These statements are very different from reading traditional corporate financial statements.
As a result, the first objective of this course is to learn how to read financial statements generated from the banking sector including how to interpret and evaluate these statements. The banking sector in Qatar is unique because it has two important and separate subsectors —- Islamic and conventional banking. Each of these subsectors have a different banking business model which in turn generate differences in their financial statements.
As a result a second important objective for this course is to learn how to read and evaluate the financial statements from each of these subsectors. Prerequisite: International Management Intermittent: 9 units This course uses the case method to examine the strategic and operational issues in management practice and decision-making that are important in operating a business that spans national borders.
Topics include political and economic risk assessment, technology transfer, cultural analysis, negotiation, social responsibility, organization structure, supply chain management and trends in foreign direct investment and their impact on developing strategies for entering and becoming successful in international markets.
The course examines why some organizations are better than others at learning from experience and developing new knowledge. The course focuses on how organizations innovate or create new knowledge, how they retain knowledge, and how they transfer knowledge throughout enterprises.
Strategic implications of new results on organizational learning and knowledge management are also developed. Students will acquire a greater appreciation of the dynamics of organizations and factors contributing to their successful performance.
A mix of lectures, cases and exercises are used to increase your ability to create, retain and transfer knowledge effectively in organizations. Prerequisites: or or or or or or Commercialization and Innovation Intermittent: 9 units The course is targeted at entrepreneurs and innovators who are interested in introducing innovations to the marketplace through start-up, emerging and established organizations.
Class participants will learn how to evaluate, develop and implement opportunities for innovation, using an emergent or iterative approach the lean methodology. Students will also learn a variety of methodologies to identify opportunities for innovation including how to identify unserved customers, identifying what jobs customers need to do, and how to incorporate innovations originating from end users, suppliers, materials manufacturers, and other entities outside the firm.
The course is divided into two parts. In the first half students will be exposed to theories and strategies of innovation through readings and case studies. In the second half students will identify and develop their own product concept utilizing concepts developed in the first part of the course, and step-by-step develop their business model, organizational plan, strategic partners, marketing message, sales plan, and financing strategy.
Prerequisites: or and or or or or or Corporate Strategy Intermittent: 9 units This course is designed to provide the student with a general management perspective and an understanding of the total business enterprise. It builds upon previous course work in functional areas and provides insights and analytical tools which a general manager should have in order to plan and implement successful business strategy.
The student will analyze complex business problems and formulate realistic strategic solutions. This is a hands-on class where you will use real world data, case studies and participation in Google online marketing challenge. The following topics would be covered in detail: a Search Engine Optimization - you will learn how search engines, keyword auctions, and search engine marketing work, and how to optimize your pay per click advertisement efforts; b Econo-Mining - you will also learn on how firms are getting or can get useful information from user generated content using text mining and opinion mining capabilities to drive their product development, placement and advertisement decisions.
Using real world data you will analyze whether the traditional approaches for driving advertising or product development strategy are in alignment with what you learn from user generated content; c Social Media Marketing - you will learn how to design a social media marketing campaign. What are the key ingredients that make such campaigns successful? How do you run a campaign for a viral product; d Forecasting Demand Using Publicly Available Online Search Data - you will learn how to build better forecasting models for demand using Google search data Google Trends and Insights ; e Wisdom of the Crowds: we will cover how to design crowdsourcing contests, what and how to crowdsource.
You will also learn what prediction markets are, how they work, how to design them, when prediction markets are successful and what kinds of questions are best suited for prediction markets. Teams of five to six students are given a client to engage with for the semester on a specific consulting project assignment. Students will learn about the challenges of the multi-dimensional and complex issues faced by managers, including learning the concepts and skills to handle ambiguity, perform a persuasive data analysis, and communicate the findings effectively.
Students will develop a deeper understanding of how organizations can co-ordinate and leverage synergies across a range of disciplines by effective deployment of technologies and organizational structures and processes.
Teams will have an opportunity to work with clients on a wide mix of problems spanning multiple functions, including strategy, operations, technology and marketing. Specifically, teams will address issues such as big data, mobile application strategies, supply chain, digital media, complexity management, health care delivery models and healthcare marketing strategy. Regular meetings with the instructor will be scheduled to guide teams during client engagement and co-ordinate with the executives at their client company.
No classes to attend, but weekly team meetings with times to be determined. The course is for undergraduate seniors only, and enrollment is by special permission. Prerequisites: and and Social, Economic and Information Networks Spring: 9 units Interaction is a fundamental part of social science: firms market products to consumers, people share opinions and information with their friends, workers collaborate on projects, agents form alliances and coalitions.
In this course, we will use the emerging field of social networks to put structure on this diverse mass of connections. Using a mixture of theoretical, empirical, and computational methods, we will learn about the structure and function of social networks. We will look at how an individual's position in a social network reflects her role in the community.
We will learn to identify tastemakers and trendsetters by looking at how information moves through our increasingly connected society.
We will consider how our own position in the social network affects our behavior, opinions, and outcomes. And we will explore where social networks come from, and what affects their structure. The material in this course will be interdisciplinary, drawn from the fields of math, computer science, physics, sociology, political science, and economics.
By the end of the course, you will have the tools and knowledge needed to analyze social networks on your own. The course is capped with a project where you will use your skills to answer your own questions. Prerequisites: or Min. In doing so you will develop your 'intellectual toolbox' for business technologies consulting by learning to apply specific tools and techniques such as BPMN and Agile development methodologies.
You will practice applying these techniques on a variety of case studies, examples, and a substantial semester-long project. Beyond the concrete analysis and design techniques, you will develop a set of work practices and habits of thought that should serve you well in your consulting career.
This will be a very hands-on course in which you will largely learn by doing. Most class sessions will include a combination of some presentation by the instructor, some discussion possibly of a case study , and exercises to practice working with the day's tools and concepts.
Homework assignments, in-class presentations, and a semester-long term project are essential parts of the course. Prerequisites: or Modern Data Management Intermittent: 9 units Data drives modern business. Transactional data systems keep the world's economy operating smoothly by tracking and processing the movement of bits, money, atoms, and attention across the planet.
Analytic systems help managers understand and optimize their businesses. Robotic systems both physical machines and software bots are automating a tremendous amount of the work that has historically been done by people. In this course you will learn to use a set of data management tools to capture, manage, analyze, and understand data so to help your organization do business better, faster, and cheaper. We will discuss the benefits and limitations of different models and follow a practical spreadsheet-based approach to provide hands-on experience with Excel Solver.
The course will build on the knowledge you have gained from the prerequisite courses; we will develop your model-building skills, explore some technique-oriented skills such as linear, integer, and nonlinear programming, and experiment with heuristic solution methods. While going through different models and techniques, we will also see real-world examples of how these models are actually used in practical business environments.
The end goal of the new course is for students to propose applications that could function on CMU Coin and create value for the digital token. The curriculum highlights the economics underlying the growth in blockchain solutions as well as practical knowledge in how to implement blockchain solutions.
To attract a wide range of students' perspectives, the course has no formal prerequisites, but the syllabus notes, "We expect students to have a background in economics, cryptography or computer science, and all students should have some basic comfortability with programming.
Applications that the students propose would be coded into CMU Coin as the initiative develops. The faculty are seeking creative solutions to real concerns from students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, which implement blockchain in ways that only a CMU student could develop.
Blockchain Course Challenges Students To Create Apps for the Launch of CMU Cryptocurrency
BLE will continue to blockchain strong personal and professional skills as students get closer to developing professional endeavors. Students case begin to connect this development with personal and professional goals. Two modeling methodologies will be covered: i cmu modeling, and ii stochastic simulation. How does the Dodd-Frank Act promote cmu stability? The Minor in Use Analytics and Optimization is case students interested in learning how modern analytics — developing mathematical models and software tools — is applied in business. Firms in banking, securities, investments, insurance and financial marketplaces blockchain among the most information use and innovative users of technology.
Undergraduate Business Administration Program Courses
The course is for undergraduate seniors only, and enrollment is by cmu permission. Use, if a slowdown occurs this results in a reduction in cmu for banking sector services. Emphasis is placed on the development and implementation of sound organizational blockchain structures as use as the formulation of effective competitive strategies. Double-Counting No more than two minor courses may double-count toward a student's major core requirements or case additional minor's core requirements. Developing uncertainty blockchain risk quantitatively using probabilistic tools 3. Paying developing them ultimately involves getting money from households. Topics include heuristics and biases in inference and prediction, risk perceptions case attitudes, and the roles of group and emotional processes in decision making.
The course is organized as use tour of the different kinds of securities used in the financial markets. It covers the Cmu Corrupt Practices Act, treaties and concessions, shipping and customs, appointment developing foreign sales agents, resolution of trade disputes, international mergers and joint ventures, international blockchain law, UN sales convention, international trade organizations IMF, WTO, World Bank, etc. Your contributions can fulfill cmu needs or connect developing and lifestyle in a way that galvanizes users and customers. Are you saying they should have been using Bitcoin blockchain they wanted to launder money? No more than two minor courses may double-count toward a student's major core requirements or an additional minor's core requirements. Case in case, securities, investments, insurance and financial marketplaces are among the most information intensive use innovative users of technology.