Impact: Measuring Impact in Business and Social

This class provides students with practical skills for measuring impact in business and social enterprise. How large is the impact of raising prices on sales? Is an advertising campaign working? Does a non-profit actually improve people's lives? Students will finish the course with the ability to design, analyze, and skeptically evaluate experiments that can rigorously answer questions like these. Students will learn: how to evaluate claims of causality; how to conduct and analyze experiments and quasi-experiments; the advantages and disadvantages of experiments; how to quantify uncertainty; and what can go wrong in experiments. Students will acquire a conceptual understanding of basic experimental statistics to inform these skills. Students will also be exposed to how leading companies, researchers, and social innovators strategically deploy experiments. Finally, students will conduct their own experiments on a topic of their choosing in small groups. The class will not assume any prior experience or training with statistics, math or R. However, completing short problem sets and participation in weekly lab sessions will entail acquiring basic knowledge of R.