Teaching
Current courses
Empirical Strategy with AI 2025–
Empirical Strategy with AI is an interactive, project-based course designed to equip students with hands-on experience applying quantitative methods to real-world business problems. Students will extensively use AI tools and large-scale datasets that cannot be efficiently analyzed on personal machines, instead leveraging Yale SOM’s high-performance computing resources. Essentially, this course places topics covered in our core and elective strategy classes “on the computer.” We’ll use big data to answer questions that managers routinely face, such as: Where are there growth opportunities? How substitutable are different products? What prices should firms charge?
Competitor 2024–
This course equips students to use durable principles from economics, marketing, organizational behavior, accounting, and politics to achieve success in competitive environments. Students use course tools to understand a manager’s role in a company’s value creation and value capture activities. Using this perspective, we examine the potential for suppliers, buyers, complementors, and traditional rivals to function as both competitors and cooperators to a company in the marketplace. Emphasis is placed on anticipating the actions of other marketplace participants by understanding those participants’ objectives and constraints. The course explicitly recognizes that relevant players in the environment include governments, nonprofit organizations, and corporations, and that all of these agents can behave both cooperatively and competitively.
Past courses
Competitive Strategy 2015–2025
This course teaches analysis of strategic decisions facing an organization. The primary emphasis is on decisions at the line-of-business (rather than corporate) level, and the primary source of analytical method is economics. We cover traditional strategy topics such as capabilities and sustainability as well as modern game-theory models of competition. A central integrating idea is anticipating the response of other actors in the economy and recognizing that often an organization’s profits depend on the actions of other firms. We study nonprofits as well as for-profits. Class sessions are a mixture of applications (cases and other examples) and lectures.