WP Carey, Course 2 Result
So this is finals week for my second WP Carey MBA course (Managerial Econ), and because I'm leaving on vacation, I had to finish my final early. Although I haven't gotten my grade, I'm going to post a little bit about the course for the three of you that read my blog.
The course started with a very micro-economic bent to it -- we're talking supply and demand curves and lots of elasticity calculations. There was a ton of material to get through and I'm really glad I took econ in college. Week two covered different types of competitive markets, such as monopolies, oligopolies, etc... Not as bad as the first week but still pretty intense. The first half of week 3 covered costs of productivity issues (eg. how much labor you want to hire, etc...).
At this point, the course kind of shifted gears from a traditional college econ draw-lots-of-graphics-and-calculate-marginal-something mode to more of a higher level, more abstract conceptual mode. The second half of week 3 involved designing "incentive contracts", which is a fancy way of saying "worker compensation", which is a fancy way of saying "salary". This part was actually kind of cool and new to me. And fairly easy.
Week 4 involved pricing issues. This included topics such as price discrimination (no, this is does not involve the police and price profiling), which is the various methods companies use to try and extract more money from consumers. For example, we got into the theory of why stores release coupons, why bundling products (eg. a burger, fries, and shake together) is good business, and why low price guarantees are actually anti-competitive (which I knew anyway because I'm a nerd).
Week 5 was "game theory", which is pretty much what it sounds like when you're talking about strategy games. This involved issues like covering the prisoners dilemma, where two prisoners have to decide independently whether to rat each other out or not. We covered Nash equilibria (this has nothing to do with Steve Nash, it's the other Nash guy, the one who was in the movie A Beautiful Mind). Basically, it's identifying strategies that lead to results where no player can unilaterally improve their position. We also covered collusion and cartels. This stuff was pretty easy for me because I am an avid gamer and I eat strategy for lunch.
So overall, first 2.5 weeks were pretty boring, dry, and hard. The last 2.5 weeks were way more interesting. As for the reading material, it was a big letdown compared to the stats class last quarter. There was a lot of redundant information (which is merely wasteful of time). But more to the point, the reading material often used terms without defining them first, so you could only kind of get an idea what certain things meant by the context they were used in. This is really bad practice. Also, the reading material was seriously short on examples and graphs, so when I got to the homework, most of the time I was like "okay, I understand the theory, now how do I translate this into practical results?".
The final consisted of half multiple choice and half short answer. The multiple choice was pretty straightforward, except for two questions I'm almost positive we never covered in the reading material. The short answer was anything but short -- There were only 4 questions, but each question had about a quintillion subparts. Furthermore, it took longer to do because I had to check my work more carefully to make sure I didn't make a stupid mistake. Stupid mistakes on the multiple choice section are usually easier to spot because you know you screwed up when none of the given answers match the answer you got (unless answer D is, in fact, "none of the above" in which case you're just screwed). But the thing that got me was that one of the questions was on something we never covered. The question pretty much said "we haven't covered this, but we've given you all of the tools you need to figure it out". Okay. Fine. Be little bitches. The problem is, they DIDN'T give us all of the tools to figure it out. I spent two hours on the internet trying to figure out how to do it. And then the problem ended up being WAY more mathy than anything else we'd done in the class.
So overall, I thought the last half of the class was valuable, but my overall satisfaction with this class is a lot lower than with the stat class.
Next class is financial accounting. More to come when I get there.
The course started with a very micro-economic bent to it -- we're talking supply and demand curves and lots of elasticity calculations. There was a ton of material to get through and I'm really glad I took econ in college. Week two covered different types of competitive markets, such as monopolies, oligopolies, etc... Not as bad as the first week but still pretty intense. The first half of week 3 covered costs of productivity issues (eg. how much labor you want to hire, etc...).
At this point, the course kind of shifted gears from a traditional college econ draw-lots-of-graphics-and-calculate-marginal-something mode to more of a higher level, more abstract conceptual mode. The second half of week 3 involved designing "incentive contracts", which is a fancy way of saying "worker compensation", which is a fancy way of saying "salary". This part was actually kind of cool and new to me. And fairly easy.
Week 4 involved pricing issues. This included topics such as price discrimination (no, this is does not involve the police and price profiling), which is the various methods companies use to try and extract more money from consumers. For example, we got into the theory of why stores release coupons, why bundling products (eg. a burger, fries, and shake together) is good business, and why low price guarantees are actually anti-competitive (which I knew anyway because I'm a nerd).
Week 5 was "game theory", which is pretty much what it sounds like when you're talking about strategy games. This involved issues like covering the prisoners dilemma, where two prisoners have to decide independently whether to rat each other out or not. We covered Nash equilibria (this has nothing to do with Steve Nash, it's the other Nash guy, the one who was in the movie A Beautiful Mind). Basically, it's identifying strategies that lead to results where no player can unilaterally improve their position. We also covered collusion and cartels. This stuff was pretty easy for me because I am an avid gamer and I eat strategy for lunch.
So overall, first 2.5 weeks were pretty boring, dry, and hard. The last 2.5 weeks were way more interesting. As for the reading material, it was a big letdown compared to the stats class last quarter. There was a lot of redundant information (which is merely wasteful of time). But more to the point, the reading material often used terms without defining them first, so you could only kind of get an idea what certain things meant by the context they were used in. This is really bad practice. Also, the reading material was seriously short on examples and graphs, so when I got to the homework, most of the time I was like "okay, I understand the theory, now how do I translate this into practical results?".
The final consisted of half multiple choice and half short answer. The multiple choice was pretty straightforward, except for two questions I'm almost positive we never covered in the reading material. The short answer was anything but short -- There were only 4 questions, but each question had about a quintillion subparts. Furthermore, it took longer to do because I had to check my work more carefully to make sure I didn't make a stupid mistake. Stupid mistakes on the multiple choice section are usually easier to spot because you know you screwed up when none of the given answers match the answer you got (unless answer D is, in fact, "none of the above" in which case you're just screwed). But the thing that got me was that one of the questions was on something we never covered. The question pretty much said "we haven't covered this, but we've given you all of the tools you need to figure it out". Okay. Fine. Be little bitches. The problem is, they DIDN'T give us all of the tools to figure it out. I spent two hours on the internet trying to figure out how to do it. And then the problem ended up being WAY more mathy than anything else we'd done in the class.
So overall, I thought the last half of the class was valuable, but my overall satisfaction with this class is a lot lower than with the stat class.
Next class is financial accounting. More to come when I get there.
posted by Tarindel @ 2:24 PM
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