Business Administration

This course is designed to help students to gain a deep understanding of Chinese consumers and Chinese market and expose students to the business innovations and marketing practices in this market. This course will discuss the characteristics of Chinese consumers and the evolution of demand, the growth of Chinese brands, the business innovations powered by internet and important marketing strategies leveraging social media and mobile technology. The course will also cover cases of international brands in China and analyze the underlying reasons for their success or failure in this market. You will learn the strategies that marketers can use to operate successfully in today's dynamic environment.

Students study the role and content of management accounting systems and learn computational and evaluative techniques for information analysis, organizational planning, and problem solving. Students learn how management accounting systems help organizations identify, measure, and communicate information for valuation purposes and enable managers and employees in an organization to make informed judgements and decisions.

Businesses have been revolutionized with the introduction of new information technologies (IT) and artificial intelligence (AI). This course provides an understanding of the key economic concepts to operate and be a successful IT-enabled and/or AI-driven business and to impart an appreciation of the economic impacts of IT and AI at the firm, market, and societal levels. The course discusses competitive market analysis, IT-related economic issues of pricing and bundling, information asymmetry and uncertainty, as well as AI-related topics of automated decision, and economic impacts of AI technologies.

This course offers basic knowledge of key concepts in human resource management. It covers fundamental topics such as work design, personnel selection, performance management, and compensation. In studying these topics, the course discusses implications of various human resource management actions and policies for individual employees as well as team and organizational culture, for short- and long-term performance, and for financial as well as non-financial goals. In doing so, it analyzes human resource management from multiple points of view, including human resource specialists, supervisors, and the top management team.

This course focuses on the performance of European firms according to essential external users such as investors and “analysts." It deals with a specific angle of analysis - the financial aspects of the performance - viewed from users like shareholders, bankers, creditors, customer unions, and tax authorities. Comparability of financial information through the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is a key issue in an international environment. Taking a user perspective throughout, whether discussing reporting principles or in the practice of financial analysis, this course is divided in two parts: identifying the financial information provided in the IFRS system, and examining the analysts’ views on this information? The course covers international and comparative accounting, performance indicators, methods for measuring the success of a firm, and evaluation methods for company financing policy. It also discusses comparative differences in international practices, as doing business with European companies requires the ability to analyze the information they provide. Other topics covered include how investors and analysts view the information that companies provide, what they see as its strengths and weaknesses, what information really matters to them and what they all but disregard, and finally, how they estimate the company’s performance through the information provided in IFRS.

This course studies corporations in relation to the structure of productivity and human relations, the business environment, business as a cultural project, business and the management of human resources, decision making, the spirit and workings of mercantilism, and production and finance. To do so, the course utilizes local, national, generalized, and specialized mass media.

This course provides a series of strategic frameworks for managing innovation not only in high-technology industries but also in mature industries in terms of vintage innovations. First, it provides participants with the knowledge and tools to analyze both endogenous and exogenous factors of a firm, meaning a firm’s resources, capabilities and industry dynamics to respond to technological and market changes. Equipped with analytic skills, participants will understand how firms formulate and implement strategies, selecting the best one to gain and sustain competitive advantages over each firm’s innovations.

The course deliver the most important issues on mergers, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring such as corporate divestitures. In particular, the course develops students' ability to critically understand and evaluate issues such as: regulatory and strategic considerations, takeover tactics, and takeover defenses; target firm and foreign target firm valuation; issues developed through information economics that contribute on the negotiation and re-negotiation stage of corporate reforms; empirical tests on the performance of merging and divesting firms at both the announcement- and the post-merger or integration period; and cross-border (cross-industry) acquisitions and their main differences with domestic (focused) ones.

This course aims at providing strategic framework and practical knowledge for future entrepreneurs who explore new business opportunities through creating a venture or acquiring a job position at existing firms. By the end of the course, students should be able to have a clear understanding of how to develop raw ideas to product, service, or business concepts through the process of identifying, refining, and screening opportunities, and should be well poised to take the next steps to designing and successfully launching a new product, service, or business. To shed light on entrepreneurship from the perspective of ideation, project management, and valuation, this course incorporates both top-down theories of resources to bottom-up simulations.  

Neuroeconomics, sometimes also known as Decision Neuroscience, is an emerging field combining insights from economics, psychology, and neuroscience to understand how (healthy) humans make decisions and how these are related to underlying cognitive and neural processes. The ultimate goal of Neuroeconomics is to integrate knowledge from the different parent disciplines to answer the fundamental question of how our brain makes us decide. This course provides an introduction to Neuroeconomics by discussing examples showing the limitations of viewing decision-making merely through the lens of the traditional fields of economics, psychology, and neuroscience. The course reviews various methods used in Neuroeconomics research for measuring and influencing brain activity. An important part of the course is devoted to learning the foundations and models of Neuroeconomics such as the basics of neuroscience. Seminal and recent studies in Neuroeconomics are read, discussed, and critically evaluated. This interdisciplinary and challenging course consists of lectures and group work. It uses formal concepts from economics and neuroscience. Prerequisites include sufficient quantitative skills and basic knowledge of microeconomics.