DECISION MODELS

Credit Hours: 1.5 · Graduate

Successful management requires the ability to recognize a decision situation, understand its essential features, and make a choice. However, many of these situations - particularly those involving uncertainty and/or complex interactions - may be too difficult to grasp intuitively, and the stakes may be too high to learn by experience. This course introduces spreadsheet modeling, simulation, decision analysis and optimization to represent and analyze such complex problems. The skills learned in this course are applicable in almost all aspects of business and should be helpful in future courses. The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, we discuss the use of decision trees for structuring decision problems under uncertainty. In the second part of the course, we discuss Monte Carlo simulation, a technique for simulating complex, uncertain systems. Throughout the course, we will use Microsoft Excel as a modeling environment, using add-in programs as necessary. Familiarity with Excel is an important prerequisite for this course. Repeatable for Credit.