Crafting better decisions

• Faculty:  Prof Chengwei Liu

Purpose of the course

One of the key proficiencies required to drive organizational and personal success is the ability to make effective decisions. As a working professional, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the many decisions you face in your day-to-day lives and fail to recognize barriers that can impede your decision-making capabilities. Quality decisions are often hindered by blind spots, cognitive biases, and automatic judgements. By understanding the mechanisms that drive decisions, this course will enable you to identify and eliminate potential barriers to enhance your decision-making process.

Content

The course starts with the classic findings and insights from behavioural and organizational sciences that demonstrate when and why people make biased decisions without being able to learn and correct for these mistakes. We also highlight the biases that are most relevant to modern organizations, such as discriminations, diversity biases, overconfidence, underestimating independencies, competitor neglect, and being fooled by randomness. Students will then learn how to overcome these biases with techniques include decision checklist, nudging and strategic arbitrage. 

Learning outcomes

The course has two main learning objectives. By the end of the course you will:

• Understand the latest findings and insights from behavioural and organizational sciences about when and why people make suboptimal decisions
• Acquire a toolbox of techniques that enable better decisions