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Managing Behavior: Psychology, Economics, and Experiments - Part 1: Guiding Behavior at the Workplace

How do individuals interact with each other? How should economic activities be coordinated?
Course code
MGMT413
Course type
BSc Course
Weekly Hours
2,0
ECTS
3.0
Term
FS 2024
Language
Englisch
Lecturers
Prof. Dr. Peter-J. Jost
Please note that exchange students obtain a higher number of credits in the BSc-program at WHU than listed here. For further information please contact directly the International Relations Office.
This course focuses on analyzing, understanding, and predicting how people make individual decisions. We will perform most of our analysis through the lens of behavioral economics.
  • In the first part, we discuss individual decision-making while taking the environment in which a person acts as given. For our analysis, we divide the whole decision-making process into two sub-processes: The judgment process, which refers to how people perceive and interpret their environment, and their actual decision processes, which refer to which activity or line of behavior they choose.

Even though individual decisions will be at the center, we will also extend our perspective by considering a person's behavior in the context of social interactions.

  • In the second part, we thusplace the person into an organization and analyze their decision-making in an an interactive situation, wherepeople'sbehavioral consequences are also affected by others with whomtheyinteract. Following the literature on managerial economics, we examine how the misalignment of individual goals influences a person's behavior and decision-making. We then discuss possibilities for how to solve the resulting motivational problems by designing an appropriate incentive structure.
Date Time
Wednesday, 10.01.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Wednesday, 10.01.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Tuesday, 30.01.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Tuesday, 30.01.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Tuesday, 06.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Tuesday, 06.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Friday, 09.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Friday, 09.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Wednesday, 14.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Wednesday, 14.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Thursday, 15.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
Thursday, 15.02.2024 11:30 - 15:15
By the end of the course, you will advance your knowledge in different ways:
  • Learning about the influences of psychology and sociology will help you understand why and how people make decisions.
  • Answering questions regarding the respective last lecture will help you to reconsider the contents discussed in class.
  • Learning to write a research paper will help you to deal with a new topic and be useful for your BSc-thesis.
  • Learning toanalyze an experimental paper will help you to think critically about and apply the underlying theories.
  • Learning how to design an experiment will be useful for identifying differences between theory and practice.
  • Learning to speak in front of others will be useful for your university and business career.
Jost, Peter-J. (2014). The Economics of Motivation and Organization. Edward Elgar Publishing
Lecture
Presentation
Experiments
  • Experiment & Presentation: 45%
  • Paper: 35%
  • In-class assignments: 20%
  • Participation: Tiebreaker
Your willingness to solve puzzles!
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