Doctor of Philosophy Decision Sciences Techniques School of Business The Decision Sciences delivers a variety of modeling techniques for use in diverse industries. The subject matter is meant to give students a "mathematical toolbox" usable across many disciplines - whether using regression to forecast sales, designing spreadsheets for portfolio optimization or constructing decision tree models to evaluate different R&D alternatives. Because of its flexibility, the major is an ideal complement to majors in finance, economics, operations or marketing. In recent years decision science techniques have been especially relevant for companies in the following areas: general consulting, oil & natural gas, automotive, pharmaceuticals and transportation.
MPhil
An MPhil degree will demonstrate possession of the skills necessary to carry out supervised research by the analysis of existing data or small original data sets, while a PhD will demonstrate the ability of the student to conduct original research and will be an independent and original study, using new and larger data sets, which advances the frontiers of knowledge in the subject area. Students has to complete the first 5 courses and a dissertation for the MPhil degree (50 credits) Course Description (10 x 4 = 40 Credits) BAP 4131 - Accelerated Mathematical Methods This is an accelerated and extended version for students with previous exposure to probability and statistics or those who feel comfortable absorbing technical material quickly. It reviews, with added business examples; the topics covered and teach additional topics such as Markovian decision policies, simulation, and analysis of risk, game trees and bargaining. BAP 4132 - Accelerated Statistical Methods The course covers all topics and cases and some additional material such as "Log it Regressions" and "Topics in Time Series Analysis". BAP 4133 - Decision Analysis 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. BAP 4134 - Strategic Decision Making Decision makers face two types of uncertainty: uncertainty about the state of nature (how much oil is on a tract of land) and uncertainty about the strategic behavior of other decision makers (what pricing strategy a competitor will follow). This course focuses on strategic uncertainty and the uses decision makers can make of the concepts of game theory to guide their decisions. Topics include bargaining and arbitration, collusion and competition, joint cost allocation, market entry and product differentiation, and competitive bidding. BAP 4135 - Business and Economic Forecasting This course is an introduction to practical forecasting methods for individual industries and sectors of the economy. Emphasis is placed on forecasting financial markets, including short-term interest rates, bond yields, aggregate and industry stock prices, and foreign exchange rates. Actual economic data will be used throughout the course. Topics include methods of reducing multicollinearity, autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity; improving forecast accuracy; eliminating simultaneous equation bias; treatment of outlying or missing data points; seasonal adjustment; and use of percentage changes and logarithms in forecasting.
BAP 4136 - Pricing Strategies This course provides students with a comprehensive framework for formulating and implementing pricing strategies. Techniques that take account of the often imprecise and uncertain information to which management has access are useded to analyze the influence of costs, demand and competition on the pricing decision. BAP 4137 - Empirical Methods in Strategy To develop and implement a business strategy, managers must make sense of massive amounts of information. Most managers (and the consultants they hire) can compute the means and standard deviations of individual variables, but few are adequately prepared to identify the relationships among variables or to interpret those relationships in the context of the underlying managerial issues. This "clinical" course provides that preparation. Through the development of rigorous statistical analysis skills linked to theoretical issues in management and strategy, students learn how to draw inference from data about realworld strategic issues. BAP 4138 - Understanding and Managing Risk Risk is mostly considered to be engendered by financial risks, macro-economic effects and acts of nature. Losses caused by acts of nature are often insurable but in many cases risk cannot be protected against. Risks in financial markets are decreased by use of recently designed financial instruments, broadly studied. BAP 4139 - Management of Technology This course develops approaches to analyzing strategies within technology markets. It teaches students how to analyze commercial forces in hyper-competitive markets, where firm structure, product cycles and competitive environment change rapidly. The course asks students to develop strategies that align with these structural market forces. These issues are illustrated through general readings and with cases from computing, electronics, online, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals markets. The course strikes a balance between presenting a few general models of market behavior and presenting a few key episodes of market behavior. BAP 4140 - Negotiations This course is designed to improve students' skills in all phases of negotiation: understanding prescriptive and descriptive negotiation theory as it applies to dyadic and multiparty negotiations, to buyer-seller transactions and the resolution of disputes, to the development of negotiation strategy and to the management of integrative and distributive aspects of the negotiation process. The course is based on a series of simulated negotiations in a variety of contexts including one-on-one, multi-party, cross-cultural, third-party and team negotiations. Dissertation (30 credits) The student is required to demonstrate the ability to design and conduct independent research by submitting and defending a thesis, which constitutes a significant contribution to knowledge in the field of studies. The thesis must embody the results of original investigation, conducted by the student, on an approved topic from the major subject area. Total Credits: 70 Post Doctoral Fellow The Fellowship holder should conduct an independent research on a specific topic approved by the university and submit a dissertation on the topic of research to the university for evaluation. After evaluation of the dissertation university will award a certificate of completion for fellowship.