Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: ECONOMICS OF ORGANIZATIONS

Department: Management

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Lecture

Credit Hours: 1.5

Description: The course provides an analysis grounded in economic principles of issues in organizational design. More specifically, the focus is on how incentive conflicts within a firm can lead to a reduction in shareholder value and how such conflicts can be addressed. We shall study a framework that develops a productive organizational architecture --- assignment of decision rights to the appropriate decision-makers, evaluation of their efforts, and rewards based on performance. Students generally find the text material relatively easy to understand without extensive lecturing by the instructor --- this enables us to spend more class time on applications of the concepts, whether these come from cases, assigned articles, and homework questions.