Incentives and Productivity

This course is designed to teach the student how to use economics to solve practical personnel problems that affect worker productivity. Topics include: selecting the best workers to hire, training workers, turnover, setting compensation strategically, structuring salespersons' commissions, downsizing, using promotions as an incentive mechanism, and other topics. Examples and cases will be presented to demonstrate the importance of using economic techniques to structure human resources programs. The course will appeal most to the student who expects to be a general manager or who hopes to run his or her own business. Although the human resources specialist may benefit from this course, the emphasis will be on decisions that affect personnel, but are made primarily by general managers. The class format is somewhat unusual. Most classes consist of lecture with questions, but two are class workshops. The lecture will present a theoretical development of a topic. The questions discussed during the last part of the lecture period will involve practical business application of the theory presented in lecture. This course is more technical than other human resources courses, but should be accessible to anyone who has successfully completed the economics and statistics courses in the MBA core. Every student is expected to know calculus and basic probability and statistics. Although I will not emphasize the technical aspects on the final exam, the problem sets will require some knowledge of mathematics. To ease your fears, many "poets" have taken variants of this course in the past and have done well.There will be graded team problem sets and a final exam.