Jagadeesh Sivadasan

Incentives and Productivity, MBA (Elective) Course, BE/MO 619

The topics covered in this course include hiring and firing decisions, human capital and on-the-job training, turnover, the provision of incentives, the advantages and disadvantages of alternative compensation schemes, objective and subjective performance evaluation, relative performance evaluation, promotions and other career-based incentive schemes, team production and team incentives, stock options and executive compensation, non-monetary compensation and mandated benefits.  Each of the major topics is introduced by a class discussion of an actual business case, with a focus on understanding what can be taken away from the case and generalized more broadly. For each practice, tool or approach that we analyze, we identify the key goals, and the trade-offs associated with them and explore how, why and under what circumstances various approaches work or do not work.

Optional Text:  Lazear, E. and Gibbs, M., Personnel Economics in Practice, John Wiley and Sons.

Managing the Future of Work

Accelerated Management Development Certificate Program

The world of work has become incredibly complex. Technological and social forces are changing how work is done, who does it, and even what work looks like. Change is happening at a rapid pace. What leaders expect — and what is expected of them — is changing, too.

This course explores multiple forces that are transforming the modern labor markets and workplaces with particular emphasis on technology and automation. It will blend theory and practice on how these forces are impacting talent acquisition, human capital investment, performance evaluation and incentive design.

Applied Microeconomics, MBA (Core) Course, BE502/503/591

This course provides students with the foundations of microeconomic analysis. The primary objective is to develop the abilities of students to apply fundamental microeconomic concepts to a wide range of managerial decisions as well as public policy issues. Foundation topics include: consumer behavior and market demand; the nature of the firm, its costs and supply behavior; market forces, price formation and resource allocation; international trade and trade restrictions; and, market power and price-setting behavior. Students will also be introduced to more advanced topics in microeconomic analysis, including decision-making with risk and imperfect information, more complex pricing strategies, and game theory.    

Optional Text: Robert S. Pindyck and Daniel L. Rubinfeld, Microeconomics, Prentice Hall, Inc.  

Co-instructor (with Francine Lafontaine): Applied Industrial Economics, PhD (Elective) Course, BA875

This course covers materials from those areas of industrial organization economics most relevant to business school PhD students, providing foundations for research on economics related topics in business economics, international business, strategy, marketing, operations, finance and other fields. The course also complements the Industrial Organization sequence in the economics department, and as such should be of interest to students from the Economics department who are considering industrial organization as a field or who may be interested in a career in business economics. We review important theoretical advances in each subject area, but the emphasis will be on illustrating the variety of approaches used in empirical research. This focus on applied advances is meant to provide a solid foundation for students interested in pursuing empirical work in their own dissertation, but also to help students interpret existing empirical work and what it can contribute to theory development. This IS NOT a methods class: econometric techniques and other statistical tools are not the primary focus. Instead, the goal will be to understand the empirical methodology, namely the way authors approach the theory, how they derive testable hypotheses, where and how they obtain the necessary data, and finally, how they generate and interpret their results. Topics to be covered vary somewhat from year to year depending on instructor and student interests, but usually include theory of the firm, vertical integration decisions, vertical (channel) relations, industry dynamics, and productivity.