Evanston; MTh 10:30-12:00.
Chicago Saturdays; 9:00-12:00.
Information will be updated with any changes.
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.
More advanced skills will be introduced and supported inside and outside class as needed.
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 your introductory DECS course (e.g. confidence intervals). I do NOT expect you to be able to reproduce these concepts from memory, only that you recall them as needed.
I also need you to vaguely recall the concept of logarithms (as typically covered in high school algebra). Most of you have seen logs in DECS or FIN classes earlier; that would be more than sufficient for our purposes.
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.
This course counts towards the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Major.
MECN 451 and OPNS 450 are complementary analytical courses. OPNS 450, Modeling Using Spreadsheets, emphasizes optimization and operations applications, including such topics as supply chains, process flows, and spreadsheet-based optimization.
MECN 451 focuses instead on decision-making under uncertainty in strategy, economics, and organizational settings. We use simulation, sensitivity analysis, decision trees, and AI-assisted modeling to study problems involving risk, network effects, real options, human judgment, rare events, and public policy. Students interested in developing a broad analytical toolkit may benefit from taking both courses.