The primary theme of this course is to examine how firms can achieve superior financial performance through the establishment of a sustainable competitive advantage at the business level. Contemporary theories of strategic management will be discussed and critically examined for their relevance to the problems facing many of today's managers. Topics include analysis of industry attractiveness, value-chain analysis, core competencies, and business-level strategies.

This course covers corporate-level strategy and strategy implementation. The focus of the course is on the strategy of the firm as a whole, and the interrelations between different divisions. Topics will include related and unrelated diversification, and the various means of engaging in diversification, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and strategic alliances. Contemporary theories of strategic management will be discussed and critically examined for their relevance to the problems facing many of today's managers.

This course focuses on the connections and interplay between personal and social values, ethics, and public policy. It explores how values and norms influence public policies and how the resulting expressions of values through public policies impact the implementation and effectiveness of policy choices. It also delves into how different countries make widely different policy choices based on their citizens’ values and social norms. The course also considers how new developments in science and technology influence the interplay between values, ethics, and policy across multiple issues. In addition, this course explores how to formulate values-based explanations of certain public policy preferences. Topics range across the policy issue spectrum.

Why are we still so bad at protecting computer systems? Is it because we don’t have good enough technology? Or because we lack sufficient economic incentives to implement that technology? Or because we implement technologies but then fail to use them correctly? Or because the laws governing computer security are so outdated? Or because our legal frameworks are ill-equipped to deal with an international threat landscape? All these reasons—and others— have been offered to explain why we seem to see more and more large-scale cybersecurity incidents and show no signs of getting better at preventing them. This course will examine the non-technical dimensions of this problem—the laws and other policy measures that govern computer security threats and incidents. We will focus primarily on U.S. policy but will also discuss relevant policies in the E.U. and China, as well as international tensions and norms. The central themes of the course will be the ways in which technical challenges in security can be influenced by the social, political, economic, and legal landscapes, and what it means to protect against cybersecurity threats not just by writing better code but also by writing better policies and laws.