Couse Instructor

Prof. Martin Cripps

John K. Wallace, Jr. and Ellen A. Wallace Distinguished Professor of
Managerial Economics
University College London

Ph.D. 1986, London Business School, UK

Couse Description

An essential skill for managers is the ability to take unstructured business problems and distill them down into manageable, simplified problems for which the tradeoffs that are the essence of the decisions are very clear.  In this course, you will study the fundamental concepts that economists have developed for explaining the behavior of companies and consumers and learn to apply these concepts to business problems.  All of the concepts in the course have been tested over many years and are valid in any setting when properly applied.

In many ways, this course is designed to help you think about the decisions that you make as leaders of your organizations in a structured way, bringing clarity to the important tradeoffs that every business faces.  The tools and concepts in this course will also allow you to reflect back on successful and unsuccessful decisions that you have made and help you understand why the decision ultimately proved to be successful or unsuccessful.  By understanding at a deeper conceptual level why some decisions were successful and others were not, you gain insight into the important trade-offs that you face.  Moreover, with deeper insights into the problems you face, you can have greater confidence in the decisions you make because you will better what are the assumptions you are making and how they affect your decisions.