Management I

I Sequential Decision Making Under Uncertainty with Applications to Operations and Management Sciences

When decisions are made sequentially, the fundamental tradeoff at stake consists in balancing immediate reward with unpredictable future rewards. These situations can be found in a wide variety of areas raging from marketing (e.g. dynamic pricing) to the environment (e.g. water management). In this course, we will primarily focus on applications in the field of management science. The approach is based on Markov decision processes and more generally (stochastic) Dynamic Programming, which provides a set of general methods for making sequential decisions under uncertainty.

Literature: Bertsekas: Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control, vol I (2005), vol II (2007); selected articles

II Marketing Science

The second part is on Marketing Science: Models and Experiments and is specifically designed for students with an economics background. Marketing Science deals with topics in consumer choice and industrial organization, using analytical, experimental, and econometric approaches. It focuses on marketing decisions of the firm (e.g., segmentation and targeting, price, distribution, promotion and advertising, product definition), and often incorporates notions of consumer perception and persuasion. In this particular course, we actively contrast the findings of `models' (perhaps more familiar to economists) and `experiments' (often related to social psychology), in areas of the literature of great practical relevance. Each session is organized around two contrasting presentations (each by two students) of important papers, followed by a debate and additional technical inputs and perspectives from the instructor.

Literature: several articles