Courses Descriptions

ACCT D31 Managerial Accounting
This introductory study of the application of cost accounting techniques to business problems emphasizes the system of internal reporting through the application of costing and managerial information systems for different situations and purposes. Solutions to particular types of problems and the structural evolution of costing systems for management planning and control in business are emphasized.
Prerequisite:  Accounting D30

DECS D50 Decision Analysis
From time to time, we are faced with very difficult decision problems. They can be so difficult that we have no idea on how to make the decision. In such situations, knowledge of Decision Analysis will be of great value. Decision Analysis can help us to understand better the problems we face and thus make better decisions. It provides effective methods for organizing complex decision problems into some structures that can be analyzed and offers useful tools for analyzing them.
This course is designed to equip the students with quantitative methods and tools in decision making process. They will learn how the quantitative methodology can be useful in real life. The course focuses on enhancing the students' abilities to practically apply their quantitative skills to solving real-world decision problems. Applications are selected from capital investment, bidding, purchasing, inspection, inventory control, and other areas.
Prerequisites:Introductory courses in probability, statistics, and calculus.

FINC D41 Finance II
This course explores theories, empirical evidence, and applications of corporate financial policy.  Basic topics covered include consumption, investment, and financing decisions.  The early part of the course covers topics on capital structure, cost of capital, moral hazard, designs of contracts and securities, signaling, and asymmetric information.  The second part of the course focuses on valuation and capital budgeting under certainty and uncertainty.  Other topics covered include corporate governance, dividend policy, mergers, acquisitions, corporate control, and related theoretical and applied issues in corporate finance.
Prerequisites: Finance D30 and Decision Sciences D34, Accounting D30 and MECN D30 are recommended.  

FINC D42 Financial Decisions
This course uses case studies to enhance the student’s understanding of managerial financial decision making. The course covers topics in short and long term financing, capital structure decisions, cost of capital, capital budgeting, firm valuation, financial and operational restructurings, and mergers and acquisitions. The course emphasizes the application of basic financial principles. It provides students with the opportunity to practice applying the concepts and theories developed in other finance courses to actual ‘real world’ problems.
Prerequisites:  Finance D30 and Finance D41

FINC D48  New Venture Funding
This course is designed to provide students with an understanding and working knowledge of both sides of the new venture funding process:  that of an entrepreneur raising funding and of an investor in new ventures. Students will create a financial plan and valuation for a new business idea, will engage in simulated presentations to and negotiations with investors.  Students will also manage a simulated venture capital fund, make investments in new ventures and generate a return on their portfolio.  Through this course, students will learn to look at new venture funding issues both from the perspective of the entrepreneur and from the perspective of the venture investor.

FINC D60 Investments
This course examines financial theory and empirical evidence useful for making investment decisions. Topics include: 1) behavior and distribution of stock returns; 2) portfolio selection bsed on mean-variance analysis; 3) cross-sectional models of risk and return analysis; 4) performance evaluation of mutual funds based on the market model; 5) market efficiency (including asset pricing anomalies and behavioral finance); 6) bond valuation, and the term structure of interest rates; 7) interest rate risk management of bond portfolios by matching duration and convexity. The course involves several projects, including applications to real-world problems such as portfolio selection and investment management.
Prerequisite: Finance D30.

FINC D65 Derivative Markets 1
This course covers forward, futures, options, and other derivatives.  It offers an introduction to option pricing framework, tools, and applications.  Specific topics include strategies for speculation and risk management, no-arbitrage pricing for forward contracts, the binomial and Black-Scholes option pricing models and applications of pricing models in other contexts.  Option pricing models have applications in diverse areas of finance, such as investments and corporate finance.  At the end of the course, students should be able to price derivatives, use them to construct speculative and hedging strategies, and apply them to make other financial decisions.
Prerequisite: FINC D30 Finance 1
Prerequisite: Finance D30

FINC D70 International Finance
This course examines the foreign exchange markets, the nature of foreign exchange risks, aspects of the financial management of a multinational corporation. The course explores the determination of spot and forward exchange rates and the relationships that link exchange rates, the prices of goods and interest rates throughout the world. Various concepts of foreign exchange risk are explored, and hedging foreign exchange risk with forward rates, futures contracts, and foreign currency options is examined in detail. Strong emphasis is placed on valuing these derivative securities at any point in time. Pricing by means of no-arbitrage arguments is given substantial weight. Construction of synthetic options is explored. The attributes of exotic currency options is discussed. Overall, the course provides a substantial introduction to the concepts involved in foreign exchange risk management.
Prerequisite: Finance D30

FINC D79 Financial Planning and Governance
This course uses financial analysis and the economics of contracts and management control systems to provide an understanding of how corporate governance is related to shareholder value creation. The nature of incentive conflicts in organizations and how contractual and governance arrangements and market mechanisms mitigate such conflicts is analyzed. The theoretical concepts developed in analyzing value creation and destruction in specific contexts such as decentralization and examples of corporate restructuring such as mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, spin-offs and leveraged recapitalizations are then applied.
Prerequisite: Finance D30

LAW D30 Business Law
This course is designed to acquaint students with concepts and applications of the law of contract. The topics covered include examination of legal issues affecting business operations, including product liability, employment and taxation. The course also briefly explores the law governing international trade activities.

MGMT D35 Management Consulting Practices
This course is designed to provide students with a hands-on consulting experience on a two-consecutive-module course. Students will gain an in-depth understanding and familiarization with necessary skills (both soft and hard skills) for executing a consulting project from beginning to end, as practiced by leading international management consulting firms. It provides students with an opportunity to work under a condition resembles “real” management consulting environment and to apply problem-solving techniques to solve managerial problems with an emphasis on being “result orientated and customer focused.” This learning-by-doing lesson is designed for students to work under pressure in a team-setting environment where, in addition to analytical skill, teamwork and project management skill become crucial in delivering meaningful results under tight schedule.

MGMT D54  Formulating Competitive Direction
This course is designed specifically to prepare students to become a successful entrepreneur and manager who have to compete in a changing market environment with limited resources under control. The course covers various aspects of competitive strategies and tactics for students and provides an understanding of different industry conditions and market segments and how to create a sustained competitive advantage through different competitive strategies; how to articulate a new strategic direction under intense competitive environment; how to define and deploy competitive strategies with dynamic and uncertain changes in the industry due to competitors’ strategic moves; how to structure the necessary analyses and synthesize the analysis results to formulate a new strategic direction at the business unit level.

MGMT D55 Informational Technology
This course addresses the opportunities and challenges involved in applying information technology to modern business organizations. The interplay between information technology and business strategy, business processes (systems) and human resources is explored from a general management perspective. Major developments in information technology are identified and their impact discussed. Executive direction of the design and deployment of information technology is addressed. Case studies are used throughout the course to illustrate both effective and ineffective use in a variety of industry, application and strategic settings.

MGMT D52 Strategy in Domestic and International Business
This is a continuation of the first-year strategic management course (MGMT D31), but with a particular focus on the international dimensions of this topic.  Management D52 is designed to acquaint the student with the delineation of business policies by the firm that engages in cross-border transactions, and the development and implementation of a strategy that will allow the firm to achieve its cross-border goals and objectives.  The pursuit of such ends usually occurs within a competitive context, in which other rival organizations seek similar if not the same ends (e.g., market share, profits, control of scarce resources, etc.).  Accordingly, the essential drama of the marketplace is how one firm attempts to “win” vis-a-vis its rivals-- that is, how it develops and implements a competitive strategy for successful cross-border business transactions.
Prerequisites: All Basic D30 courses

MGMT D62 Entrepreneurship and New Venture Formulation
This course focuses on the initiation of new business ventures as contrasted with the management of ongoing enterprises. The emphasis in this intensively interactive and uniquely structured course is on applying concepts and techniques that were studied in various functional areas to the new venture development environment. Questions that are addressed include how to effectively screen venture ideas; how to identify and define the fundamental issues that are relevant to the new venture; how to prepare a cohesive, concise, and effective Business Development Plan (BDP) for a new venture; how to identify the venture's market niche and define its business strategy; how to determine the best time for launching the venture and for selling it; how, when, by whom, how much, and what type of financing should be raised; how to evaluate the viability of the venture, etc. Actual venture cases, readings, and some outside speakers who address important topics, such as venture capital and legal issues, are used. Student teams conceptualize and develop business plans for a venture of their choice.
Prerequisites: All Basic D30 courses

MGMT D68 Corporate Social Responsibility
This course is designed to get students to not only review their way of thinking on the ultimate goal of business, but also to equip them with tools, best practices and ideas on both doing good for its communities and doing well for its sustainable profits.  Students will be expected to achieve the following concepts: what CSR is and why it is important to align business goals with cultural and social ones; how corporations can choose the right social issues to voluntarily support; what recommended practices are for Conflict-Sensitive Businesses; and how to create a Corporate Responsibility Culture.

MGMT D73 Global Initiatives in Management
This course offers students an opportunity to learn about non-Thai business environments within an innovative and flexible framework that combines traditional classroom-based learning with structured in-country field research. Classroom instruction is held during module 3.1, followed by a period of field research in another country scheduled immediately after module 3.1, which is followed by seminar presentations of written student reports. GIM courses are organized by student leaders under the guidance of a faculty adviser. If you would like to become a GIM student leader, please contact the MBA office for more information.

MECN D41 Competitive Strategy and Industrial Structure
An analysis of the determinants and nature of competition in a variety of industry structures is covered. The course considers how the structure of a firm's industry affects its strategic choices and performance. Special attention is given to the possibility that the firm's strategic commitments may change the structure of its industry. Topics discussed include the dynamic aspects of pricing, entry, and exit in concentrated industries, and product differentiation, advertising, and technological change as competitive strategies.
Prerequisiste: MECN D30

MECN D46 Pricing Strategies
This course provides students with an opportunity to develop a systematic framework for assessing and formulating pricing strategies. Economic, marketing, organizational, psychological and competitive factors all effect the pricing decision and each of these presents an interesting aspect of the pricing problem. The course revolves around understanding hoe one may go about making a pricing decision while keeping in mind these factors. To achieve this objective, we will learn appropriate concepts, methods, and explore new approaches for formulating pricing strategy. This course is less about the mechanics of setting a price-it is more about understanding the process of making pricing decisions.
The course will use a combination of lectures, cases, and exercises. Assignment will be in the form of reading (text and relevant articles), case preparation and discussion, problems for discussion, and a case write-up.
Prerequisites: MECN D30 and Marketing D30

MKTG D52 Consumption and Marketing
Contemporary marketing requires a holistic understanding of consumer behavior as they interact in marketplaces around the globe. This course will help you comprehend, stimulate and manage the marketing forces that shape and reflect the consumption. You will grasp the market as a complex system of material and metaphysical interactions, and learn to manipulate these intersections in a pro-social, ethical manner. This course encourages you to understand marketing as a subtly interlocking psychological and sociocultural system. You will explore instrumental and expressive behavior of stakeholders engaged in creating, circulating and transforming resources. Tempering interdisciplinary perspectives with a symbolic cast and combining the techniques of systematic introspection with participant observation, you will examine the many ways that consumption ramifies throughout daily life. You will learn to animate the stuff of life. Positive and normative managerial interventions will be thoroughly considered; consumer creativity will be interpreted as well. Marketer and consumer misbehavior will also be probed. This course is especially attentive to the interplay of macro- and  micro-level forces that shape our marketing practices.
Prerequisite: Marketing D30

MKTG D55 DigiMarketing
This is a new course about a still emerging topic. All participants in this course should realize that the course—and DigiMarketing—are works in progress. DigiMarketing is crucially dependent on consumer-created content, prosumers, crowdsourcing or whatever you want to call it. This course aims to be an open-source course. We would like this course to jointly created, jointly developed and jointly conducted. You can expect more reading than in an normal elective course. You can expect that reading to mainly from a computer screen. You can expect to spend much more time confused and inundated with material than in a normal elective course. You can expect the structure of the material to emerge only with time and effort. You can also expect to be studying marketing at the bleeding edge, and asking yourself “how can I apply this to my business/career/interests”.

MKTG D59 Services and Hospitality Marketing
This course examines the marketing and managerial implications of the differences between goods and services. A wide variety of services are examined, such as travel, professional services, hospitals, banks, hotels, churches, sports clubs and theme parks. The course discusses many service marketing concepts, including the relationship between the service provider and customer, the real-time experience of services, customer satisfaction and service quality. Prerequisite: Marketing D30

MKTG D68 Multicultural Marketing
This survey course on multicultural marketing is based on a combination of lectures, discussions, quizzes, cases, videos, outside speakers, country specialist reports, and a final marketing project in another country. It integrates and addresses the significant impact of cultural, economic, political, infrastructure and population variables in cross-cultural marketing management and acquaints students with basic strategic and functional areas of marketing in a cross-cultural environment. After their initial exposure to the field, students can seek more in-depth knowledge in areas of specific interest to them.
Prerequisites: MKTG D30 and MKTG D50

MKTG D75 Marketing Engineering
In today’s environment, Chief Marketing Officers require tools and techniques to both quantify the strategic value of marketing initiatives, and to maximize marketing campaign performance. This course emphasizes many of the analytic marketing tools commonly used in the management consulting industry.  The course is designed to help marketers demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of marketing and leverage data from marketing analytics to make better and more informed marketing management decisions. The course covers marketing measurement and analytic marketing for brand positioning, new product development, customer value based segmentation, customer life time value management, and resource allocation.  Students will be required to use a simplified version of marketing decision support systems called Marketing Engineering for Excel, have access to real data sources, and will conduct hands-on marketing analysis.
Prerequisites: Marketing D30 and D50

OPNS D50 Analytical Decision Modeling with Spreadsheet     
This course focuses on structuring, analyzing, and solving managerial decision problems on Excel spreadsheets.  We will address problems of resource allocation (how to utilize available resources optimally), risk analysis (how to incorporate uncertainty in problem parameters), decision analysis (how to synthesize a sequence of decisions involving uncertainty), data analysis (how to summarize available data into useful information), and forecasting (how to extrapolate past data into the future).  In each area, we will consider specific managerial decision problems, model them on Excel spreadsheets, analyze and solve the models using available Excel commands, functions, tools, and add-ins, and study economic interpretations of the solutions obtained.
This course is not about learning spreadsheet skills; it is about modeling, analyzing and solving business decision problems on spreadsheets.  This course involves a hands-on, in-class learning experience, so attending each class and bringing a laptop computer (with Office 2007 installed) to class are absolutely essential.  Course requirements consist of creating and analyzing models of assigned problems and cases on spreadsheets and submitting a term project that illustrates a new application of the course material to a problem of your choice.  All work may be completed in groups of five. 
Prerequisites: Decision Sciences D34 and Operations Management D30

OPNS D75 Project Management
This course is designed to capture basic concepts and models whose use will enhance successful management of projects in businesses. Topics will include a structured approach to project management, project life cycle, project selection and evaluation, organizational concepts in project management, project planning and scheduling, project monitoring and control, and project termination. Experienced guest speakers will be invited to present and share their project management experiences during the course.

The objective is to get insight into human behavior, understand organizational issues and learn quantitative methods that are necessary for successful project management. The course has a strong emphasis on team work and a significant amount of interaction is expected during lectures, assignment and case discussions, and project presentations.
Prerequisite: Operations Management D30

MORS D35 Measuring the ROI of Human Capital and Human Resources
People, the human capital of organizations, are frequently described as an organization’s greatest asset.   It is critical that we measure the return on the investment in our people and the human resource processes that support our people just as we would measure the return on any other critical capital investment. This course focuses on why and how we measure the effectiveness of an organization’s human capital in successfully executing business strategy and goals.  The course will also identify the key human resource programs and processes that are critical to executing an organization’s strategy, and learn how to measure their effectiveness in helping to achieve business goals and objectives.  This course will provide tools and techniques for measuring the return on the investment (ROI) in key strategic human resource management programs including recruiting and staffing, compensation and benefits, training and development, career and leadership development, and performance management. 

MORS D38 Managing Human Capital in a Global Context
This course will be an advanced seminar on the management of human capital in global business.  Frequently the single largest line-item investment which enterprises make is people.  While home country socio-economic and political situations and laws may be easily handled by most companies, the complexities involved in leading and managing people across borders cannot be underestimated. 
This class will have a clear focus on global issues, and will revolve around the five domains of Global Human Capital: Strategic HR Management, Global Talent Acquisition and Mobility, Global Compensation and Benefits, Organizational Effectiveness and Talent Development, and Workforce Relations and Risk Management.  Although Thai practices will be referenced, the focus will be on cross-border issues, particularly some of the more frequent business destinations in the world: The EU, the US, China, India, the UK, and Canada. 

MORS D70 Negotiations
The objective of this course is to improve students' ability to negotiate effectively, analyze negotiation situations, develop a strategic plan for effective negotiation, gain an intellectual understanding of negotiator behavior, develop interpersonal strategies for increasing your social capital, increase your emotional intelligence, and to gain confidence as a negotiator. The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiation and power of social capital so that you can negotiate successfully in a variety of settings. This course will provide you with the opportunity to develop skills experientially, understand useful analytical frameworks, grasp how social capital is created and destroyed, and appreciate the role of emotion in many negotiation situations.