COURSE NUMBER: MBA257.1B

COURSE TITLE: Decision Making

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2

INSTRUCTORS: Don Moore

E-MAIL ADDRESSES:  dmoore@haas.berkeley.edu

MEETING DATES: Spring B only (3/14-5/4)

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION: bcourses

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.

CAREER FIELD: Anyone with a job that makes decisions that matter, including executives in every industry.  The course is also relevant to anyone who advises others on their decisions, including consultants and coaches.   

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES: Don Moore holds the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership 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 classes on managing organizations, negotiation, and decision making.  He is only occasionally overconfident.