GSM6270

This course develops an economic view of strategic decision-making and bargaining/negotiation for managers based on the theory of games. The course is broken into two major areas. With a practical emphasis, we develop decision-trees for ubiquitous problems including moral hazard, adverse selection, the incentives of team production, and optimal contingency planning. The same theory facilitates studying important properties of communication in strategic settings. In the second major area, we study formal games of bargaining and negotiation with discussions of issue linkages and tradeoffs, time-money tradeoffs, optimal strategies, and communications. What should you believe and what are just bluffs? These topics permeate decision problems in the for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors.

Atkinson Graduate School of Management