Maastricht University - School of Business and Economics

This course provides students with a better understanding of basic consumer buying behavior preparing them to describe, explain, and predict how consumers will behave under various marketing conditions and actions. This course develops an understanding of the underlying mechanisms in order to remain abreast of today's rapid changes in consumers' motives and needs. This course starts from formal theories and concepts and discuss their usefulness in developing effective marketing strategies. Most sessions are organized around the consumer's purchase decision process, consisting of needs arising, information search and processing, brand evaluation and attitude development, purchase, consumption, and post purchase evaluation. Other sessions address specific consumer-specific or environmental variables that affect this decision process.

Ecosystems are central to addressing business and societal challenges; they foster collaboration and the pooling of resources to drive innovation aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This course adopts a managerial perspective to create and manage ecosystems—physical, digital, or hybrid. Explore strategic, engineering, and technological intersections, stakeholder relationships, and real-world examples such as Brightlands campuses and global hubs like Silicon Valley. Through designing your own ecosystems, participants build practical skills in developing value propositions and collaboration structures, highlighting the practical relevance of ecosystem management.

This course introduces students to the field of information management with particular emphasis on the management of information within organizations. Students are provided with opportunities to explore the basic concepts and principles of information management as well as apply these concepts and principles to practical problems. Advanced topics are also introduced throughout the course to foster greater depth of understanding, to challenge students to think about established issues in new ways, and to highlight gaps in our current understanding. Some appreciation is also fostered for the limitations of empirical research and for the unique challenges associated with the management of information. The course discusses themes that are directly relevant to producing information management professionals. Some of these topics are measuring the impact of IT on business performance; IT consumerization; Big Data: the role of business intelligence and business analytics; IT governance; and information security. All of these topics are on the top of the agenda of an information manager, and practitioners are constantly looking for methods to better address these issues. For non-IM specialists, a discussion of these topics helps to understand the most relevant problems that are part of using IT in organizations. Given the widespread use of IT, managers who are active outside the field of IT also deal with many of these same problems on a regular basis. The discussion of each topic focuses on methods and tools that are being used by practitioners to deal with these issues. For most topics, additional readings are available to provide background knowledge for students who lack the relevant prior knowledge.

The course teaches the economics of transition and resilience. The focus is on understanding the relevant phenomena and discussing the importance of resilience at the individual, firm (micro), and economy wide (macro) level as well as understand why rationally bounded agents and competitive markets cause resilience to be less than efficient. The course results in students designing feasible policies and institutional reforms that can promote resilience at one of the levels identified above. In this course, work on a challenge, provided by the European Commission's DG ECFIN, unit Economics of Transition and Resilience. This current and real-world policy challenge is our guide throughout the course. Students prepare a policy brief for the Commission and present it in Brussels. The course combines an existing group project with an individual learning journey, where you get a chance to apply what you have learned creatively and present the results professionally.

The course History of Economic Thought provides a broad overview of the history of economics as a science. The major schools of economic thought and many of the greatest economic thinkers in history are explored. Their contributions, taking into account the proper historical context are studies. The course emphasizes not only the strengths of the theories, but also their deficiencies and the various ways in which other economists have dealt with these deficiencies. Knowledge and understanding of first year and second year microeconomics and macroeconomics (intermediate level) is required.

The course presents an introduction to the economic theory of the public sector. The topics covered include public goods, externalities, education, health care, pensions, redistribution, collective decision making and cost-benefit analysis.  A prerequisite for this course is a basic course in microeconomics.