Course Description
This course is to expose students to an intense guided tour of several managerial research questions and of the corresponding tools made available by the management sciences to address them. The course concentrates on theoretical and practical business models and enable students to better appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative research models. Researchers make an increasing use of simulations, data mining, and forecasting methods to formulate and solve managerial problems of increasing complexity. In this context, acquiring model building as well as model interrogation skills becomes crucial for academic researchers. This course will cover in particular, data mining with neural networks, decision analysis, simulation and optimization methods. Students will also be exposed to the fundamentals of sensitivity analysis for guiding the crucial phase of exacting managerial insights from a simulation code. Special attention will be given to critical thinking about the assumptions and limitations of the different scientific models.