MBA Core Courses

This course helps students understand how business decisions affect and reflect society. Because the decisions of managers not only influence but are also influenced by public policy concerns and moral issues, students learn how to integrate economic, social, legal and regulatory, and moral considerations in decision making. Topics include contracts, agency agreements, partnerships, corporations, the role of law in society, business regulations and antitrust policy in the global environment, and ethical and social values in different cultures, and employment and labor relations.

This course provides students with the knowledge of typical personnel management decision faced by managers, including job analysis, selection development, disciplinary actions, appraisal and compensation issues, and global human resource issues.

The focus of this course is on the application of quantitative analysis techniques for strategic business decision making. Topics will include probability and descriptive statistics, survey construction, project management tools, forecasting methods and statistical process control. These quantitative decision support techniques assist managerial decision making in the world of business, including applications to finance, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, quality, service, and human resources problems.

This course is a study of individuals and groups and their behaviors in organizations. The interaction of human, technological and structural factors in organizations will be examined. Important issues to be considered include theories of communication, motivation and decision making. Students also study organizations for key design variables and reward systems aimed at improved performance and organizational efficiency through employee motivational programs, participative management and cooperative decision making.

This course focuses on developing students' knowledge and skill set for teamwork and leadership. The course provides a critical review of key concepts, models, theories, and practitioner approaches relating to leadership in organizations. Illustrations and application of leadership principles will be demonstrated through experiential exercises, and skill development exercises. Translational work between theory and practice is applied as students examine current leadership theories in complex work environments.

This course considers the domestic and global economic environment of business and its impact on management planning and decision making. This subject has two broad areas: Microeconomics focuses on how individual decision-makers behave and interact in markets. Macroeconomics sees the economy as composed of several broad groups of decision-makers, particularly households, firms, and governments, and studies how the interaction of these groups affects the aggregate performance of the economy. These two approaches are complementary, illuminating different aspects of economic behavior. By the end of the class, students will gain a basic understanding of the main principles of economics, as well as international trade and financial institutions and systems.

This course provides the student with context through which s/he will be able to gain an understanding of the subject of financial management that is covered in depth in later courses, and delivers the tools to perform various types of financial analysis utilized in those courses. As an overview of corporate finance, the course introduces: the roles of the financial manager; the major financial markets and institutions, and their functions; and corporate financial statements and their uses. The course then introduces students to techniques of financial statement analysis to assess corporate performance. It concludes with an introduction to the concept of the time value of money and its application.

The course focuses on the use of accounting information in reporting managerial performance and making business decisions. The course covers the preparation and use of managerial accounting information for use in planning, budgeting, control, break-even analysis and pricing, including the impact of taxes. Completion of the course will enhance the student’s ability to understand managerial accounting reports and use this information in making decisions.

The goal of the course is to learn how a corporate financial manager can evaluate prospective investments in financial instruments. As the key to asset valuation, the course begins with a study of interest; how rates are formulated based on an assessment of risk and macroeconomic policy. The course proceeds to study the valuation of the most basic forms of marketable debt and equity assets: bonds and stocks. In studying the valuation of stocks, the course introduces the risk vs. reward and dividend vs. growth trade-offs, and basic portfolio theory.

This course is designed to provide students with a systematic approach for making marketing decisions and to give students practice in the analysis, design, implementation, and control of marketing strategies. Topics include how individual and organizational consumers make decisions, segmenting markets, positioning the firm's offering, effective marketing research, new product development, pricing strategies, communicating with consumers, estimating advertising's effectiveness, and managing relationships with sales force and distribution partners. The course also studies how firms must coordinate these different elements of the marketing mix to ensure that all marketing activities collectively forge a coherent strategy.

This course focuses on the many ways information technology is incorporated within contemporary organizations and used to achieve a competitive advantage in the national and international marketplace. It focuses on the basic principles of Information Technology: hardware and software components, database technology, telecommunications and networking, e-commerce and e-business, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Decision Support Systems (DSS), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Expert Systems (ES), systems development and implementation, and the ethical and societal issues involved in IT.

This penultimate course focuses on the perspective and skills of the general manager. Its purpose is to provide practice in diagnosing and identifying realistic solutions to complex strategic and organizational problems. The course builds on previous coursework by providing an opportunity to integrate various functional areas and by providing a total business perspective. Since the focus is on pragmatic, action-oriented general management skills, the course will be taught primarily through the case method and will require both written analyses and case presentations.

In this capstone course, students will individually prepare a thesis which requires preparation of a case study and analysis report based on their company. The case study will focus on a description of events in the company surrounding a specific decision made by the firm. Writing the case will allow the student to explore the situation in depth, looking at such issues as linkages and causality. The analysis report will provide an analysis of the key issues, recommendations and relevant theoretical linkages. Copies of completed cases and analysis notes would be maintained by AUIS for faculty consideration for adoption in subsequent offerings of their courses. Top ranked cases may be submitted to case conferences such as the North American Case Research Association’s (NACRA) annual meeting or for publication in case journals such as the Case Research Journal or the Business Case Journal.