Classes

Being “strategic” means intelligently seeking your own goals in situations that involve other parties who do not share your goals. In this school “corporate” typically refers to a business entity, for example a corporation owned by shareholders whose interests in the firm are exclusively financial. And “management” refers to the kind of job you will enter upon graduating from here. The purpose of this course is to develop your understanding of
strategic situations encountered as a manager in a business firm. Taking this course will teach you to recognize strategic opportunities when they arise, to frame those opportunities within a model that your business partners can understand, to predict how your own actions will affect the actions of other parties involved, and to exploit such opportunities for your own benefit.

To learn strategic corporate management you will need a set of tools for analyzing strategic situations, lots of practice to implement your chosen strategies, and a way of evaluating your performance. The toolkit is non-cooperative game theory; the practice comes from designing games, and participating in classroom experiments; the results of the experiments provide the means for evaluating your performance. The experiments are based on Comlabgames, software for designing, running and analyzing experimental games over the Internet: http://www.comlabgames.com/

>   Auctions & Markets 73-440

This course investigates auctions and markets. Part analytical, part experimental, and partly data driven, it shows how the outcomes of different auction and trading mechanisms depend on the characteristics of the bidders and traders, the bidding or trading rules, and the information that the traders have. The course makes extensive use of Comlabgames to simulate the various types of auctions and markets we analyze. It is divided into four roughly equal parts.A detailed description of the syllabus is provided at the end of this handout. Part 1 is a detailed study of auctions, arguably the simplest market form. Part 2 extends our analysis of auction to monopoly, which differs from the simplest auctions because multiple units are sold and the monopolist can restrict sales. In Part 3 we investigate the effects of adding sellers and buyers to both sides of the market, and extend our framework to multi-market settings, including stock exchanges. Part 4 applies the concept of competitive equilibrium to analyze behavior in markets and evaluate its predictions.