General Information
Promotional Video
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Target Audience
This course is relevant to students interested in marketing, design, product innovation, customer experience management, psychology, strategy, behavioural finance, and public policy.
Format
Summer intensive over 2 weeks
Course Mission
The purpose of this course is to make behavioural economics (BE) accessible as a tool for solving management problems. By the end of the course, students should:
- Have a working understanding of key principles of behavioural economics.
- Understand the relevance and implications of these principles for common marketing (and many other business and policy problems).
- Be able to develop behaviourally informed insights and tactics.
- Be prepared to evaluate and apply unfamiliar or emerging BE concepts they may encounter in their future roles as managers and leaders.
Course Scope
Classical economics and management theory say a lot about how people should make decisions to achieve optimal outcomes. But how people actually make decisions can be quite different from this ideal case, and often results in sub-optimal choices. BE is about when, why, and how real human decision-makers fall short of perfect economic rationality—and why that matters.
One pillar of the course focuses on common failure points in rational decision making, some of which (like the bias toward “default options”) have been popularized in the press as possible consumer “nudges.” Here, the objective is to familiarize students with a more complete roster of core concepts and importantly, help you understand how and why they work. Ultimately, you will learn to distinguish between more (and less) promising opportunities to use these principles.
A second pillar of the course is about the context and process of decision making, or what is sometimes called “choice architecture.” This perspective turns out to be an extremely useful complement to the “heuristics and biases” described above, and a key to deploying these ideas across a wide range of managerial problems. Classical nudging, for example, works best when it focuses on one specific part of a multi-step decision process that is likely to have the greatest combination of relevance (to many people) and impact (on each individual). Product design, as another example, is improved by insight into how consumers evaluate a product at different stages of the trial, usage, and repeat purchase process, because these insights help inform firms’ thinking about the potential impact on long-term value from different design and marketing choices firms make.
Evaluation and Grade Breakdown
| Component | Due Date | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Class Participation | Ongoing | 20% |
| Individual Case Project | TBA | 40% |
| Final Group Project | TBA | 40% |
Required Resources
No textbook. There is a package of cases and articles.