COURSE NUMBER: MBA 257.1B
COURSE TITLE: Decision Making
UNITS OF CREDIT: 2 units
INSTRUCTORS: Don Moore
E-MAIL ADDRESSES: dmoore@haas.berkeley.edu
CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION: http://bspace.berkeley.edu
MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00-4:00PM,
during Spring B (3/18 to 5/8)
PREREQUISITE(S): MBA205
CLASS FORMAT: A mixture of lectures, exercises, and in-class
simulations
REQUIRED READINGS: Course reader
BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE (midterm, final, paper(s), project(s),
class participation, or a mixture): I will compute grades based on performance
on quizzes, exams, and homework problems.
ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
This course has two objectives: The
first is to improve the quality of your decisions. You will learn to be aware
of and to avoid common inferential errors and systematic biases in your own
decision making. While intuition often serves us well, there are many decision
traps that we tend to fall into on a repeated basis. These traps relate to how
we think about risk and probability, how we learn from experience, and how we
make choices. This course will teach you about the traps. It's true that each
decision is unique and poses its own special problems. At the same time, there
are many commonalities across decisions. Understanding a few basic principles
can take you a long way. By the end of the course, you will have internalized
the basic principles and will be able to avoid falling into the traps. Knowing
what can go wrong and knowing the right questions to ask will help you think
smarter.
The second course objective is to
improve your ability to predict and influence the behavior of others. Even if
you are completely rational yourself and require no tutoring whatsoever (there
are always a few people who think this of themselves), you will still find this
course useful. Managers, consumers, investors, and negotiators all fall into
the traps. Therefore, understanding the psychology of decision making can give
you a competitive advantage.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES: Don A. Moore is a Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow in
Management of Organizations at the Haas School of Business at the University of
California at Berkeley. His research interests include overconfidence,
including when people think they are better than they actually are, when people
think they are better than others, and when people are too sure they know the
truth. His research has appeared in popular press outlets and academic
journals, from Psychological Review to Harvard Business Review. He is the
author or editor of three books, and he teaches popular classes on managing
organizations, negotiation, and decision making. He is only occasionally
overconfident.