Managing Global Decisions
This course will focus on the risks associated with organizational challenges and strategic opportunities multinational corporations face as they seek to establish productive relationships with international partners and maximize value creation.
Managerial Economics covered the basic ideas underlying the economic behavior of individual markets (theory of exchange and supply and demand), firms (cost and pricing), and industries (i.e., strategic interaction). Global Economics for Managers will expand your knowledge of economics in two directions. First, we expand the scope of inquiry to cover the economics of the nation in a global economy.
This portion of the course will cover international economics and macroeconomics. We will study the larger economic forces that shape production, trade flows, capital flows, interest rates, exchange rates, and other variables that create the global economic landscape. The second direction is international microeconomics. This part of the course will apply the tools of microeconomics and international economics to illustrate how globalization influences performance, strategy, and policy within firms. Our ultimate objective is to help you develop a framework for analyzing both opportunities and risks in a global economic environment.
Students will be asked to evaluate risks associated with an international decision facing a corporation (e.g., outsourcing decision, decision regarding a technology alliance partner) They will consider the risks associated with global sourcing, production, pricing, and distribution, as well as the risks associated with intellectual property rights issues, differences in legal systems and other country characteristics, cultural differences, challenges related to managing a globally distributed workforce and global knowledge management.
Students will conduct a risk analysis and provide the company a detailed analysis of the expected enterprise risks associated with each decision alternative. They will relate these alternatives and their risks to the unit's and corporation's strategy and risk appetite under conditions of uncertainty not unlike the ones facing many corporations today.
Anyone taking the course should understand that they will be asked to make strategic decisions based on limited empirical data, assumptions, and tools that are not always empirically rigorous.
This class will emphasize the world of strategic decision making where decisions must be made although empirical data is limited and technological and environmental conditions are uncertain.