Business Administration

Dynamics in the Chinese financial markets has attracted much international attention. This course provides an understanding of how the Chinese financial markets originated and developed, what reforms have been done, the difficulties in future reforms, and possible steps the government would take in the next five years. Starting with a comprehensive introduction, the course covers the major financial markets in China, including the central bank and the banking system, the stock market, the bond market and the foreign exchange market. Each market is an individual topic, for which the course first reviews the fundamental concepts and theories, explains the history and facts in China, presents examples and cases, and talks about the future reforms. 

This course examines cities rich in cultural heritages and develops a theoretical framework to understand the development of city culture for city destinations. Through field trips to the main cultural attractions in a city, students are required to analyze the development plans and marketing strategies for these destinations. 

One of the important trends of modern business is globalization. Organizations, particularly multinational corporations, are continuously expanding across national borders. This course focuses on multinational corporations as a context in which issues in managing the globalization of an organization are examined. It covers both the macro and the micro aspect of global business management. The macro aspect involves the considerations of the various contexts of the host nation, including the legal, economic and cultural. The micro aspect involves the internal operating environment of the organization, including organizational culture and structure, staffing and training needs, and dealing with business partners across national borders. Regional examples are emphasized. 

The International Internship course develops vital business skills employers are actively seeking in job candidates. This course is comprised of two parts: an internship, and a hybrid academic seminar. Students are placed in an internship within a sector related to their professional ambitions. The hybrid academic seminar, conducted both online and in-person, analyzes and evaluates the workplace culture and the daily working environment students experience. The course is divided into eight career readiness competency modules as set out by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which guide the course’s learning objectives. During the academic seminar, students reflect weekly on their internship experience within the context of their host culture by comparing and contrasting their experiences with their global internship placement with that of their home culture. Students reflect on their experiences in their internship, the role they have played in the evolution of their experience in their internship placement, and the experiences of their peers in their internship placements. Students develop a greater awareness of their strengths relative to the career readiness competencies, the subtleties and complexities of integrating into a cross-cultural work environment, and how to build and maintain a career search portfolio.

This course examines brand management from a corporate and commercial perspective. It is a study of the historical evolution of brands, their main components, how they are managed and built, and how they communicate. This course also analyzes the primary models of brand evaluation.

This course examines imperfectly competitive markets as well as the behavior of firms in these markets. The course looks at the effects of various business decisions and of various forms of policy intervention on the way firms compete and on the outcome of oligopolistic markets. Prominent recent antitrust cases are also discussed. Topics discussed include game theory, the determinants of market power in static oligopolistic models, strategic positioning and advertising, consumer inertia, collusive agreements, horizontal mergers, strategic and non-strategic barriers to entry, exclusionary practices, and anti-trust intervention. Prerequisites: familiarity with basic microeconomics concepts, in particular with the notion of Nash Equilibrium and Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium, with basic oligopolistic models (such as Bertrand and Cournot models of static competition) and with the fundamentals of unconstrained and constrained optimization problems.