This course introduces students to the economic way of thinking. The purpose of the course is twofold. For those considering future coursework in economics, the main goal is to prepare you for the more rigorous intermediate-level courses. For everyone else, a course of this nature enables you to understand and critically evaluate economic arguments made in media.

The topics to be covered are supply and demand, elasticity, externalities, cost of production, perfect competition, monopoly, oligopoly. Games will be conducted during classes to deepen the understanding of economic concepts.

Behavioral economics is a relatively young field, and firms have begun implementing it within the last decade. This course seeks to provide an overview of how behavioral economics is used to study decision-making in the corporate world.

The topics to be discussed will include heuristics and biases, gift-exchange behavior, auction mechanism, discrimination in markets, nudge, gender economics, and charitable-giving. Each student will present one paper on the reading list in class. In addition, the final project requires students to design their own behavioral projects.

This course seeks to provide a fundamental training in statistics and a comprehensive understanding of how it is applied in business environments. Topics include exploring and collecting data, probability, random variables and their distributions, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing, linear regression, and non-parametric tests. We will practice using widely-used statistical software in industry (e.g. Excel and R) to perform statistical analysis.