Course Overview
This course has two major objectives: to develop your ability to frame business decision problems in a way that makes them amenable to quantitative analysis, and to train you in some fundamental techniques useful for analyzing and solving these problems.
The course draws on three toolkits:
- Spreadsheets to model business problems.
- Optimization techniques to solve complex decision problems involving many variables and constraints.
- Monte Carlo simulation for understanding and analyzing uncertainty.
Examples from different functional areas will demonstrate how the techniques taught can be applied in a practical way to a variety of settings.
Key Takeaways
Objective of this class is to develop your ability to frame business problems in quantitative terms, and analyze them for understanding, insight, and good solutions. The primary focus will be on problem formulation and analysis—identifying the key components of a decision problem, structuring it, translating it into a spreadsheet model, and working with the model to generate useful insights. Students will be introduced to tools such as decision trees, Monte Carlo simulation, influence diagrams, optimization, and sensitivity analysis.