University of Commerce Luigi Bocconi

In this course, major musical styles and genres of the 20th century, within and beyond the Western canon, are presented and discussed from the theoretical, aesthetic, and socio-cultural points of view. The first part of the course focuses on the mutual influences between jazz and classical music in the first half of the 20th century. An analysis of musical ensembles, forms, and other structural elements leads to an understanding of how and to what extent these two distinct musical worlds influenced each other and in some cases even blended, making the stylistic categorization of some works uncertain. The second part of the course provides an in-depth study of musical genres and listening approaches in relation to the radical technological transformations of the 20th century, which leads to a reflection on the concept of art music and the problem of value in music. Students learn to identify and distinguish musical trends; assess how musical movements have informed contemporary society and recent history, and how society and history have fostered certain musical movements and for what reason; and evaluate how the dialogue between music and technology has evolved over the past decades, and predict potential future scenarios. 

This course introduces the main kinds of derivatives, with an emphasis on pricing and hedging issues, and on how investors and corporations can use these instruments in practice. The main contents of the course are: introduction to financial derivatives; forwards, futures, and swaps (institutional apsects, pricing, hedging); options (institutional aspects, pricing, hedging); and basics of credit risk and credit derivatives. Prerequisites: a solid understanding of financial economics; familiarity with the mathematics of interest rates (discounting/compounding, equivalence of rates at different maturities), with basic statistics (expected values, standard deviation and variance, ordinary least squares), and calculus (limits, differentials, differentiation, Taylor expansions, partial differentiation, optimization, basic integration). 

This course provides students with a model of marketing appropriate for organizations operating in creative industries. The core concept of the model is the value for the customer. In creative industries this value is generated by transforming the creativity contained in creative products into intense and satisfactory customer experience. The course gives evidence to the cultural and organizational role of marketing within organizations operating in creative industries. This role consists in keeping organizations aligned to their markets, by means of the development of a broad and deep market knowledge and the building of long-lasting relations with customers through the continuous renovation of value propositions.

This course builds a comprehensive understanding of what it means to do business in China and with Chinese corporations. The course offers in-depth knowledge of the specific incentives and constraints defined by China’s unique political, economic, and legal business environment. Building on this macro-framework, the course then continues to explore a variety of different kinds of organizations (ranging from state-owned firms to private and foreign firms) and their distinctive characteristics of business management. The course takes a multi-layered, institutional approach that links firm level strategies in a variety of different organizational forms with the embedding macro-environment and coordination mechanisms at the meso-level. The course consists of three modules: 1)The Macro embeddedness of business in China; 2) Market and non-market behavior; 3) Firm strategies. 

Consultants offer their professional advice to client organizations by leveraging their knowhow in the fields of management. Consultants often assist clients in the change process, and in some cases act as key characters in the implementation phase. Today, more than in the past, consultancy has become a viable professional development alternative, typically offered to young students from graduate or undergraduate degrees. The course focuses on the process side of the relationship between clients and consultants. The course also deals with the characteristics of the industry and with some key features of the profession. 

This course discusses insights into sustainable corporate communication in the digital age, and stakeholder relations from a sustainability perspective. The course analyzes and evaluates how business environment and sustainability issues affect corporate communication, how companies engage in the best practice of sustainability and corporate communication, and how companies foster stakeholder trust and relationships. Knowledge from this course may be applied to case studies to understand sustainability and corporate communication in the real life. This course equips students who are interested in ESG with skills on sustainability and corporate communication to help them become future leaders of sustainable sectors, industries or companies. 

This course focuses on the key issues in contemporary international relations., with the goal of learning the concepts and theories of IR useful to making sense of contemporary debates and developments in international politics. Focus is on the study of current events and the recent history that has shaped the international system, with specific attention devoted to foreign policy stances of big powers (the United States, China, and Russia), and to two topical international actors (the European Union and the United Nations). The second part of the course studies big trends and on-going international crises, including the rise of the Global South, the Ukraine War, and the Israel-Hamas conflict. This is followed by exploration of the four "Global challenges": energy security and climate change; migration; Africa's development; and digitalization and cybersecurity. 

This course (1) enhances students’ theoretical understanding of consumers and their decision-making processes and (2) provides students with the basic skills necessary to conduct experiments that allow them to get insights into these processes in a marketing context. The course is structured into three components: (1) the course discusses theories from pertinent literature in behavioral economics, psychology, and marketing that provide an understanding of how consumers make judgments and decisions and the factors influencing them; (2) the course examines how to use experimental research to inform and improve marketing decisions; that is, how to pose relevant research questions, design experiments and interpret the results and (3) students apply the acquired theoretical knowledge and methodological skills hands-on to solve a real-world marketing problems. 

This course provides a psychological foundation for understanding consumer behavior and marketing strategy. The course builds from current psychological theory to understand recent marketing applications. Topics include perception, attention, memory, language, categorization, creativity, social cognition, and personality, and their application to product design, marketing communications, and brand management. Students on this course learn: how the basic principles of psychology constrain and predict consumer perceptions and preferences; how psychological models can be used to develop effective marketing strategies and campaigns. Topics covered in this course include: perception and sensory marketing; perceiving similarity and differentiation; consumer memory; the language of marketing communication; marketing emotions; creative consumption; brand personality; social aspects of consumption. Prerequisites for this course include an introductory marketing course.
 

This course examines how to make decisions in business by leveraging a structured approach based on theorizing about possible future scenarios and implementing data-driven actions. The first part focuses on theoretical aspects of decision-making, while the second part focuses on data-driven analysis and interpretation of data from a business point of view. Through concrete and practical applications, students learn how to diagnose business problems, offer appropriate solutions, and generate innovative opportunities. The course focuses on the best practices that a firm can adopt to make rational decisions, namely: a structured course of action to make more rational decisions; a language to describe decisions and distinguish strategies, scenarios, and outcomes; models and statistical techniques; structured descriptive statistics; linear regression model; applications; and real cases using statistical software (Stata).