English

Firms are faced with informational and cognitive problems that threaten their efficiency and even their survival. This course shows how contract and governance structures can answer these problems. It explains how corporate firms, in their various forms, can be analyzed as networks of property rights; shows how their different organizational designs can be explained by knowledge and information constraints. It then analyzes, through theoretical models (incentives, screening, signaling, etc.) and case studies (CEOs' remunerations), the ways in which asymmetries of both information and knowledge have led to specific modes of executive governance and compensation.

This course introduces students to the field of social geography, its theoretical perspectives and substantive concerns, centered upon an understanding of societies as products of uneven and always negotiated relationships of power. Drawing on a social constructionist approach, and using mainly UK examples, students consider intersecting constructions of social class, gender, race, and sexuality, and how these constructions both shape, and are shaped by space at a variety of scales. The course includes a field walk assignment designed to develop skills of critical observation and interpretation.

This course introduces students to some key ideas and debates around human kinship and relationality; in other words, how humans relate to one another and how relationships are formed, maintained, severed, and conceptualized. In this way, the unit explores what constitutes kin, friends, lovers, and others. The study of relationality forms the foundation of anthropology, but also offers fascinating insights into what it means to be human in a range of historical and global contexts. Drawing on both classic and contemporary material from the study of kinship and beyond, the course traverses themes of marriage, reproduction, love, parenting, friendship, sexuality, reproductive technologies, and relations with non-humans. Students learn the wider significance of the topics to the interpretation and analysis of human societies more broadly. 

This course focuses on the basic concepts and theorems of Ring Theory and Field Theory, which are about generalized and abstracted properties of the set of integers and the set of rational numbers with respect to the four elementary arithmetic operations. Recommended Prerequisite: MATH321.

The course covers the following topics:

• Homomorphisms and Factor Rings
• Prime and Maximal Ideals
• Introduction to Extension Fields, Vector Spaces
• Algebraic Extensions
• Geometric Constructions
• Finite Fields
• Unique Factorization Domains
• Euclidean Domains
• Isomorphism Theorems, Series of Groups
• Sylow Theorems and it applications
• Automorphism of Fields
• The Isomorphism Extension Theorem
• Splitting Fields, Separable Extensions
• Galois Theory
• Cyclotomic Extensions
• Insolvability of the Quintic 

This advanced course in development economics provides a thorough exposition of concepts, policy issues, and controversies in the process of economic development. The course covers leading issues in development economics such as the role of trade and institutions in industrialization and long-run development as well as cutting-edge empirical research on various topics such as human capital, conflict, corruption, foreign aid, gender, and the environment.

This course provides the tools and methods for conducting independent, empirical research on smart cities topics. As such, the course provides the methodological and practical infrastructure for writing a seminar paper. The course addresses issues such as data generation and collection, choosing the research methodology, finding the appropriate analytic tools, and deriving socially-relevant insights from the research. All topics are illustrated using examples from the world of smart cities. 

This course aims to deepen and broaden the knowledge of high school biology courses, and is mainly to prepare for future courses in various professional fields of biology. 

The world has evolved into a “new normal” after COVID-19. In this rapidly changing environment, how do multinationals deal with the changes and how are they being sustainable? 

This course provides a tool to evaluate the core values of international business activities based on the various dimensions of factors, thereby fostering individual perspectives to analyze the implications of corporate internationalization activities in this changing environment. Further, the course explores the significance of sustainable management and discusses how firms should pursue sustainability in line with environmental changes. 

The first half of the course discusses theory and concepts related to international business, providing analytical background to enhance the understanding of the global business environment. The topics cover the external environment, including national differences, the global financial market, and governmental policy. This approach enables one to understand why multinational firms operate “differently” in the globally integrated world economy. 

The second half of the course studies the strategies of multinationals. Building upon the conceptual knowledge of the external environment, the course specifically focuses on how global firms plan and implement their firm-level and function-level international business strategy. 

This course aims to equip future managers with the tools of economics that can help them think strategically and make better decisions. The entire course is divided into two parts. 

Part 1: The Basics

The first part of the course covers building blocks of managerial economics: supply & demand, theory of the firm, costs and cost curves, profit maximization, firm’s pricing and market structure (perfect competition, monopoly, and oligopoly). It also introduces tools to analyze the welfare associated with market outcomes. 

Part 2: Economics of Strategy 

The second part of the course discusses a firm’s strategic interactions with rivals in the face of various market structures and market imperfections. It starts with basic game theory to give an insight to the strategic interactions between rival companies in oligopolistic settings. The conditions under which cooperation can take place are also discussed. Then, it moves on to topics related to information economics where information asymmetry plays a key role. Topics include the insurance market where adverse selection is a big problem, and managerial compensation where moral hazard is a major issue. The course concludes with a discussion of firm’s external environment in the current macro-economy.

Do Google and Facebook understand us better than we do ourselves? Are we becoming lab rats every time we go online? Is the impartially designed algorithm for predicting the probability of recidivism truly fair for sentencing individuals? When big data analytics are routinely applied in our daily lives, the ability to audit the adopted algorithms becomes crucial. This course aims to build students’ big data literacy through three major areas of focus: (1) Defining what big data is; (2) Providing an overview of existing big data analytical techniques; and (3) Discussing opportunities and challenges of big data analytics in tackling social problems.