Financial theory and empirical evidence useful when making investment decisions. Topics include: portfolio theory, equilibrium models of security prices (including the capital asset pricing model and the arbitrage pricing theory), the empirical behavior of security prices, market efficiency, performance evaluation, and behavioral finance.

An introductory course in labor economics from MIT. Emphasizes applied microeconomics and empirical analysis. Includes suggested readings, assignments, and exams.

Launch! Advertising and Promotion in Real Time is the first free, open source text for advertising and marketing classes. A new alternative to introductory texts that can cost into three figures and provide information that is extraneous or outdated, Launch! offers a basic text at no cost to students. Instead, we generate revenue through individually priced materials such as discretionary hard copies of the text (for those of you who still like to mark up your book the old-fashioned way), study guides, podcasts and streaming interviews (à la iTunes), user-generated content, advertising sales, and corporate sponsorship. There’s something else that’s really unique and cool about Launch! Welcome to the first advertising textbook written in partnership with a real-life advertising agency. It’s fine to talk about ad campaigns from the past, but we’d rather hear about one from the horse’s mouth—while it’s still happening. We’re going to teach you about the ad biz the way you’ll learn it if you choose to make it your career (and we hope you do). None of that shiny, happy, “talking heads” stuff; we’re going to take the gloves off and show you how a campaign works (and sometimes doesn’t) from the vantage point of the people who have to do it every day. Prepare to Launch!

This textbook provides context and essential concepts across the entire range of legal issues with which managers and business executives must grapple. The text provides the vocabulary and legal acumen necessary for businesspeople to talk in an educated way to their customers, employees, suppliers, government officials—and to their own lawyers.

Provides a basic understanding of legal issues that corporations meet during their existence. Follows one firm throughout its life; from birth to bankruptcy, first as a breakaway from an established high-tech firm, then proceeding through initial funding efforts, establishment of its capital and corporate structure, and through problems in labor, trade secrets, contracts and antitrust, product liability, and resolution of transnational and domestic business disputes. This course provides a basic understanding of legal issues that corporations face during their existence. The course starts by providing the basic building blocks of business law. We then follow a firm through its life cycle from its "breakaway" from an established firm through it going public. The materials covered during 15.647 (the first half of the semester) emphasize the organization and financing of the company. In the second half of the course we examine a broad array of law-sensitive issues relating to intellectual property, product development, M&A transactions, international trade, the duties of directors and officers, business disputes, and bankruptcy and reorganization. The goal of the course is not to impart technical legal skills, but to enhance the judgment which students will bring to their responsibilities as entrepreneurs, managers in established companies, or consultants and advisors. There are two take-home exercises, and no exams.

Law of Commercial Transactions is an up-to-date textbook that covers legal issues that students who engage in commercial transactions must understand. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style.

In The Law of Corporate Finance and Financial Markets, much of the course focuses on M&A and the law-sensitive aspects of financial services and financial markets. The course is designed to be an introduction to business law which covers the fundamentals, including contracts, liability, regulation, employment, and corporations. 15.617 provides an in-depth treatment of the law of finance.

This course is designed to give students an introduction to the law-sensitive aspects of M&A. In Module I, we examine the legal implications of key roles and deal structures, and walk through some of the issues that would typically arise in a simple and friendly transaction. We also give a class to the legal issues arising in LBOs and the legal concerns of financial sponsors more generally, and another class to employment-related issues, including those relating to managers facing unsettled circumstances. In Module II, we look at a variety of complications, including those that arise in the friendly or unfriendly purchase of a publicly-held company; deals involving distressed and hi-tech companies; antitrust concerns; allegations of misconduct by management or board members; and deals involving non-U.S. companies.

Opportunity for group study by graduate students on current topics related to management not otherwise included in curriculum. This five-day interactive and experiential workshop focuses on how leaders lead innovations that both promote social responsibility and produce business success. The workshop is organized around three main parts: observation, sense-making, and creating. During the observation phase, students spend a full day inside the Boston office of the design company IDEO and visit some of the most interesting proven innovators in corporate social responsibility such as Ben & Jerry's, KLD, MBDC, Plug Power (fuel cell technology), PwC, chlumberger, or core team members of the UN Global Compact. After returning from their company visits, students describe to one another what they saw and learned. In the final part of the Lab, students conceive and implement innovation projects that serve the needs of a local community. Each team presents its practical accomplishments on the final day of the Lab.

This course explores how we use story to articulate ethical norms. The syllabus consists of short fiction, novels, plays, feature films and some non-fiction. Major topics include leadership and authority, professionalism, the nature of ethical standards, social enterprise, and questions of gender, cultural and individual identity, and work / life balance. Materials vary from year to year, but past readings have included work by Robert Bolt, Michael Frayn, Timothy Mo, Wole Soyinka, H. D. Thoreau, and others; films have included Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hotel Rwanda, The Descendants, Motorcycle Diaries, Three Kings, and others. Draws on various professions and national cultures, and is run as a series of moderated discussions, with students centrally engaged in the teaching process.

Provides students opportunities to meet senior executives of private and public institutions, and to discuss key management issues from the perspective of top management. Students prepare detailed briefings identifying and analyzing important management issues facing these organizations. Seminar concludes with a one-week field trip to New York City.

Many of today’s global challenges require tech-driven solutions — climate change, the growth of the world population, cyber security, the increasing demand for scarce resources, digitalization, the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. With this in mind, it is no surprise that one fourth of the CEOs of the world’s 100 largest corporations have an engineering degree.

Solving these global problems requires leaders who, in the first place, are comfortable with technology, models and quantitative analyses — Leaders who see systems instead of isolated problems. However, simply understanding technology is not enough. Successful leaders today must have both the ideas and the know-how to put these ideas into action by working collaboratively with others, winning their hearts and minds.

We need leaders who know how to seize opportunities in a networked world, and can mobilize people and other stakeholders for large-scale change. Leaders who lead fulfilling lives and who are able to move themselves and others from the ‘me’ to the ‘we’. Leaders who are long-term oriented and who deliver economic profit, while also making positive contributions to society and the environment. We call these leaders ‘sustainable leaders’.

Organizations in the 21st century are in need of culturally intelligent managers and leaders. The pressure to build authentic global networks and to cultivate an appreciation and respect for cultural differences and similarities has driven cultural intelligence to the forefront of diversity and inclusion work.

Preparing today's students to be effective leaders in their professional lives requires that they hone their cultural intelligence as it is vital to working inter- and intra-culturally in today’s global economy. This unique ability to identify, recognize, and acknowledge the differences and similarities that exist between and among cultural groups and systems will set their leadership skills apart from the masses. And when applied, cultural intelligence can bridge the gap in cultural misunderstanding by creating awareness, knowledge, and patience of cultural norms and behaviors.

Legal Aspects of Marketing and Sales is an up-to-date textbook that covers legal issues that students who will work in marketing or with marketing managers must understand. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style.

Terence Lau & Lisa Johnson’s The Legal and Ethical Environment of Business is a book for today’s student, who expects learning to be comprised not only of substance, but also of interactive exercises and multimedia. This book streamlines the presentation of material to ensure that every page is relevant, engaging, and interesting to undergraduate business students, without losing the depth of coverage that they need to be successful in their academic journeys and in their professional careers. This is not Legal Environment of Business (LEB) “light.” Rather, this is LEB without risk of students’ eyes glazing over in boredom or from lack of comprehension. This is LEB presented in an exciting way, where every page is interesting to students and relevant to real life.

The authors recognize that the sheer volume of information to be covered in a LEB course makes it one of the more challenging courses for the business undergraduate. Not only do typical LEB texts read like the first year curriculum at law school, but also the LEB course is grounded in the humanities, which can make the subject even more demanding for students who are also taking statistics, economics, finance, and accounting.

Each chapter contains not only substantive law, but also illustrative videos, interactive exercises for hands-on learning, and discussion questions for critical thought. Additionally, each chapter presents “A Question of Ethics” section, which contains real world ethical dilemmas relevant to the topic under study. These videos, exercises, discussion questions, and ethics sections all provide opportunities for students to apply concepts that they are learning in the context of relevant LEB topics that shape or restrain actual decision-makers’ actions. It’s real world practice in the safety of the classroom environment.

Lau & Johnson’s The Legal and Ethical Environment of Business is a textbook that students will enjoy reading. This will encourage them to come to class prepared, and free you to teach the kind of course you want to teach. Request a desk copy and see for yourself.

Introduction to "soft" consumer research methods, useful for getting quick customer input into decisions on product design and development, strategic positioning, advertising, and branding. Covers interview techniques, observational methods, Voice of the Customer, focus groups, and analyses suitable for qualitative data. Introduces new information-gathering methods in development at MIT.

Our subject is the ethics of leadership, an examination of the principles appealed to by executive authority when questions arise about its sources and its legitimacy. Most treatments of this subject resort to case-studies in order to illustrate the application of ethical principles to business situations, but our primary emphasis will be upon classic works of imaginative literature, which convey more directly than case-studies the ethical pressures of decision-making. Readings will include works by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Shaw, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henrik Ibsen, among others. Topics to be discussed include the sources of authority, the management of consensus, the ideal of vocation, the ethics of deception, the morality of expediency, the requirements of hierarchy, the virtues and vices of loyalty, the relevance of ethical principles in extreme situations.

Quantitative techniques of operations research with emphasis on applications in transportation systems analysis (urban, air, ocean, highway, and pickup and delivery systems) and in the planning and design of logistically oriented urban service systems (e.g., fire and police departments, emergency medical services, and emergency repair services). Unified study of functions of random variables, geometrical probability, multi-server queuing theory, spatial location theory, network analysis and graph theory, and relevant methods of simulation. Computer exercises and discussions of implementation difficulties.

This course surveys operations research models and techniques developed for a variety of problems arising in logistical planning of multi-echelon systems. There is a focus on planning models for production/inventory/distribution strategies in general multi-echelon multi-item systems. Topics include vehicle routing problems, dynamic lot sizing inventory models, stochastic and deterministic multi-echelon inventory systems, the bullwhip effect, pricing models, and integration problems arising in supply chain management. Probability and linear programming experience required.

LearningEdge is a free learning resource for management educators and students provided open and available to the world. Developed by MIT Sloan faculty and students, this collection of teaching case studies and management flight simulations focuses on areas in which Sloan's innovative research and teaching are on the cutting edge, including entrepreneurship, leadership and ethics, operations management, strategy, sustainability, and system dynamics.

LearningEdge was formerly MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR).