When is this course offered this academic year?

Are there Excel prerequisites for this course?

The course assumes an elementary knowledge of Excel. 

In particular, you should know:

• The difference between referring to a cell as B3 or $B$3;

• What   =IF( ..., ..., ... )   means;

• Sorting rows using filters.

More advanced skills will be introduced and supported inside and outside class as needed. 

Any other prerequisites?

There are other basic requirements covered either in prior Kellogg core courses, the pre-term analytical prep, or even high school. 

• You should be able to vaguely recall basic concepts from Statistics, such as confidence intervals and the p-value from the introductory DECS level. I do NOT expect you to be able to reproduce these concepts from memory, only that you vaguely recall what they mean.

• I also need you to vaguely recall the concept of logarithms. We will only use elementary properties, such as those typically covered in high school algebra. For example, if you have seen logs in DECS or FIN classes earlier, that would be more than sufficient for our purposes.
  
  

How heavy is the workload?

The course is designed to be easily manageable for students with the basic background described above.  Students who need to strengthen their background must put in more effort, but the faculty and the TA will provide extensive support. 

The final grade is based on approximately 50% individual effort and 50% group work. Deliverables include a take-home midterm, a final exam, and homework.

Which majors does this course count toward?

This course counts towards the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Major.

Overlap with OPNS 450

(OPNS 450 is usually taught by Professor Abdallah.)

OPNS 450, Modeling Using Spreadsheets, is complementary, and taking both was valuable in building their analytical skills.

The two courses are quite different. OPNS 450 emphasizes optimization and applications to operations management, while my course, DECS 450,  emphasizes decision analysis in the contexts of competitive strategy, economics, and psychology. We go into greater depth into simulating models and conducting decision tree analysis. I do not focus on optimization, supply chain issues, process flows, etc., and instead emphasize network effects, real options, and social issues, including public policy and risk in non-market environments.

Specific Differences

• NOT COVERED IN MY COURSE:   elementary Excel functions; Students taking MECN 451 should have been familiar with elementary Excel functions.

• NOT COVERED IN MY COURSE:   optimization, pivot tables, Ksim.

• COVERED IN MY COURSE (but not in OPNS 450):   risk aversion, extreme events and thick-tailed distributions, human decision biases, cost concepts in decision making, structured finance (credit-default obligations-CDO's- and other derivatives), modeling commodity markets, public policy questions (health insurance, equity, ..), selection bias and the winner's curse,

• COVERED IN GREATER DEPTH IN MY COURSE:   ChatGPT as a tool for solving decision problems, introductory machine learning.

Bottom line:

• These are both good courses that the interested student may consider taking.