The purpose of this course is to recognize the impact of the law on management and marketing decision making. Dealing with government agencies, protecting intellectual property, avoiding antitrust traps, and product liability issues are among the highlights.

This course introduces students to methods for analyzing data residing in firms’ customer databases. The first half of the course focuses on descriptive and financial tools.  We will discuss ways to profile customer segments based on their profitability to the firm, estimate individual customers’ lifetime value, and see how this value can be altered by promotional efforts. We will review all necessary statistical concepts and learn how to use the software package SPSS to conduct a variety of marketing analyses using actual customer databases. The second half of the course focuses on building models to predict customer response, such as predicting whether a customer will respond to a particular marketing offer (e.g., direct mailing). We will also discuss how to use Tableau to visualize your data.

An introduction to the various types of investment securities such as common stocks, bonds, warrants, options, and investment company shares. Emphasis is placed on the risk-return characteristics of these securities and their use in various investment strategies.

This course concentrates on dealing with ethical decision making in business. In today’s corporate environment, businessmen and women are not only required to be aware of legal issues confronting them, but also of ethical matters that have profound effects upon them personally, their corporations, employees, officers, directors, shareholders and community.

Students will learn how to analyze and interpret published financial statements, and to incorporate information from supplemental sources to develop insights into a company’s business and associated finances. Understanding the effects of alternative accounting treatments on financial statements is emphasized. Students learn how to use this information to knowledgeably forecast future financial performance and condition.

This course provides an introduction to the field of data visualization. Students learn basic visualization design principles to produce meaningful displays of quantitative and qualitative data in order to enhance the managerial decision-making process. Students will learn various techniques for visualizing sequential, text-based, geospatial, hierarchical data and large data sets. Foci covered include data selection, data cleaning, data analysis, data presentation methods. Students will apply analysis and data visualization design principles to the design of interactive business dashboards and reports.  Students will present their work in multiple formats to a range of audiences. Students will be introduced to various visualization software tools.

Applications of microeconomic theory to business problems. Topics include a review of simple linear and multiple regression techniques, demand and supply, production and cost functions, and mathematical analysis of the different market models. The tools developed are applied to the study of common problems faced by managers. Applications may include the principal-agent problem, risk, cost management, market structures, strategic pricing, and product differentiation. Some macroeconomic models may also be discussed.

This course involves a study of the process of carrying out a marketing research project. Topics include

the identification of information needs and research objectives; development of a plan for conducting the research; sample selection and design of research instruments; data collection and analysis; and reporting research results. An attempt is made to have the class conduct empirical studies on typical marketing research problems.

This course is designed to provide further insight into the nature of the consumer decision-making process. In order to accomplish this, various other disciplines must be studied. The marketing and behavioral science literature pertinent to the  following subject areas is examined: perception, learning, motivation, personality, attitude, beliefs, social processes, social class, and culture. Finally, several models of consumer decision-making are studied and their practical implications for marketing strategy are discussed.

This course introduces best practices in project management, the study of concepts, and tools of project management. Topics will include project scope, project time, project cost, procurement management, project quality, project risk, project resources, project communications, human resource considerations, and how to be an effective project manager. Project management software will be used to analyze the project data, create work breakdown structures, Gantt charts, network diagrams, and baseline models as well as to perform earned value analysis. Students will apply project management methods, models and business knowledge to a business analytics project scenario.

A specialized course comprising in-depth analysis of process costing, job-order costing, standard costing, direct costing, and activity based costing. Other topics include cost-volume-profit analysis, relevant costs and revenues, joint and by-products, and budgetary controls and variances.

This course focuses on the problems and issues faced by multinational enterprises in conducting market research, undertaking market segmentation, and developing product, price, distribution and promotional strategies for their overseas markets. The course also examines macro-environmental factors such as economic, political, legal, geographical, and cultural issues that impact international marketing.

The primary subject matter will be studying the transactional awareness and financial statement presentation of the impact of intermediate accounting concepts on the major components of the financial statements such as assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expenses. In addition, we will study the impact this environment has on management’s decision-making process. These concepts will be studied at a deeper level than in Introductory Financial Accounting. Recent additions to the professional accounting literature and the conceptual underpinnings of corporate financial reporting will be emphasized as well.

While understanding accounting, financial and economic theory is vital to any professional in those fields, it is no longer a sufficient condition for success.  All new graduates looking to start a career in finance or accounting must be proficient in Excel.  This course is specifically targeted at helping aspiring professionals acquire those skills.  Topics covered will include an introduction to a wide variety of built-in functions in Excel, a broad selection of common problems in finance that must be modeled in Excel, as well as an introduction to more complicated topics such as array functions and subroutines and user defined functions in VBA. 

Behavioral Finance will examine the interrelationships between classical financial economics and psychology. For much of the past half-century, financial economists have largely assumed that people behaved rationally. More recently insights from psychology have drawn many of our previous assumptions into question. The Behavioral Finance class will examine the various biases that have been identified that impact financial decision-making. The course will focus on identifying conditions when these biases may be more likely to occur (for instance when other market imperfections are present) so that as investors (or those marketing to investors) the students will be better able to set aside their bias and make sound, rational, investment decisions. The course will emphasize the Investments and Personal Finance side of the financial spectrum but will also cover the same areas of corporate finance whereby managers and employees behave in ways that puzzle the classical financial economist.