This course counts toward the following majors: Decision Sciences.

Provides frameworks for reasoning about decisions in uncertain environments. Case studies and experiments are used to motivate the importance of probabilistic reasoning to avoid the systematic biases that cloud managers' decision making. Formal probabilistic tools are introduced and their relevance to modern business issues is conveyed via cases, exercises, and class experiments. Some of the applications include: inventory management with uncertain demand, principal-agent models, herd behavior, selection bias, rare events, real options and risk. The course is self-contained, and should be of value to all students, including those with prior exposure to formal probability models.

Decision Analysis (DECS-450-0)

This course counts toward the following majors: Analytical Consulting, Decision Sciences.

This course presents a normative approach to making decisions in one's personal and professional life. The first half of the course introduces the fundamentals of decision analysis: probabilistic modeling, preference modeling, the five rules of actional thought, decision tree construction and rollback, and the value of imperfect and perfect information. The second half of the course stresses how decision analysis is used in real-world practice. Topics include sensitivity analyses, influence diagrams, stochastic dominance, probabilistic encoding and tornado diagrams. A major component of the course is a group project in which students use the tools presented in the course to address a real-world decision problem of their own choosing.