Business Administration

This course introduces students to a variety of theoretical models, tools, and techniques which explore psychological well-being and their applicability in personal and professional development, and in the business world. These models are used as the basis for developing self-awareness, personal and professional strength and growth, and evaluating how these can be fostered in others, in order to achieve a positive impact on personal, professional, and organizational performance, through adaptability and change.

This course offers a study of the principles of finance. Topics include: financial economics; financial mathematics; investment appraisal; fixed income securities; risk and return; portfolio theory; capital asset pricing model; derivatives products.

This course is an introduction to ways of thinking about technology, using historical, sociological and philosophical perspectives. The course starts with lectures and seminars on fundamental questions: what is technology? Is technology socially shaped? Do artefacts have politics? What are the common mistakes in thinking about technology? The course then addresses major themes (industrialization and division of labor, technological lock-in, gender and technology, non-Western technology and maintenance) and key theories and models (Marx, Foucault, Heidegger). The course ends by addressing provocative questions such as: can machines think? Can machines be ethical? Do machines evolve?

This course is divided into two parts: entrepreneurship and small business management. In part one, it focuses on evaluating business opportunities, developing business ideas, and creating a business plan. In part two, it focuses on factors related to small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) such as human resources management, financing, and growth.

This course draws on global marketing/business situations and contexts to introduce students to the theory and practical application of negotiations with an emphasis on practical skill development. Negotiation can be taught and—with practice—improved with experience. This course covers research on negotiation-related issues but also provides a platform to develop actual negotiation skills and practice them in-class (and optionally online) using group negotiation simulations in a role-playing-game format
(RPG).

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 discusses investment planning and financing functions in the short and long term in a company landscape. It also focuses on management and control of a company's financial plan. 

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.