Prof Diane Reyniers NAB 5.22

This course is available on the BSc in Accounting and Finance, BSc in Business Mathematics and Statistics and BSc in Management. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

MG207 (formerly MN201, intermediate microeconomics) or equivalent and MG205 (formerly MN203, research methods/econometrics) or equivalent. 

This course addresses various topics in management research which will be used to encourage creative and logical thinking, structuring of clear arguments and critical assessment of evidence. The focus is on interpretation of findings rather than statistical or econometric techniques.

The intellectual backbone of the course is applied and empirical economics (including behavioural economics) and finance but wherever appropriate contributions from the psychology, sociology and management literature will be discussed. We will mainly deal with issues which are amenable to rigorous empirical investigation. The course is designed around a set of empirical research papers. Examples of questions considered are whether pain killers are more effective when they are expensive, whether successful entrepreneurs tend to have been juvenile delinquents, gender differences in negotiation.

The main objective of the course is to enable students to comprehend and critically assess the literature on selected management topics, to evaluate statements in terms of evidence and to detect false reasoning or logic.

We investigate aspects of Management and what motivates people in organisations. Topics vary each year (based on student feedback) but examples are Entrepreneurship, Racial discrimination, Negotiation, Experiments on Incentives, Placebo effects of price, Leadership, Corporate Culture.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the MT. 2 hours of classes in the LT.

Two take-home mock exam papers.

A paper course pack containing all materials (lecture slides, articles, class sheets) will be available to students taking the course.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours) in the main exam period.