strategic thinking
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Regulation of financial and securities markets is intended to protect investors while still enabling them to make personal investment decisions. Psychological phenomena, such as magical thinking, overconfidence, and representativeness heuristic can cause deviations from rational behavior and distort financial decision-making. However, regulation and regulatory bodies, such as the SEC, FDIC, and SIPC, most of which were created just after t...more
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We introduce Game Theory by playing a game. We organize the game into players, their strategies, and their goals or payoffs; and we learn that we should decide what our goals are before we make choices. With some plausible payoffs, our game is a prisoners' dilemma. We learn that we should never choose a dominated strategy; but that rational play by rational players can lead to bad outcomes. We discuss some prisoners' dilemmas in the real w...more
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Professor Freeman offers an introduction to the course, summarizing the readings and discussing the course's main goals. She also offers five tips for studying the Revolution: 1) Avoid thinking about the Revolution as a story about facts and dates; 2) Remember that words we take for granted today, like "democracy," had very different meanings; 3) Think of the "Founders" as real people rather than mythic historic figures; 4) Remember that t...more
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Khosla talks about how Juniper Systems started, and the role of customer feedback in the product development. There was not one vendor thinking of building an OC48 router for the internet. Juniper perservered and took a risk in the technology, despite the majority of customer feedback.
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Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) The lecture reviews the legal and economic strategies that can be used to manage coastal development. Over half of the United States population lives in coastal areas and will be affected by sea level rise and more intense storms. The lecture looks at the conflict between property rights and efforts to protect coastal ecosystems through the use of eminent domain to create national seashores. Bar...more
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Smith explains that New Ventures measures success in four layers. The first layer of success is immediate outcomes for the kids served by current ventures. The second layer is the ventures' impact on the system. The third layer is the success of New Schools in assisting their ventures. The last layer is the change in the entire system to a performance-based model with greater hybrid thinking.
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Over the last three years, Autodesk had to change delivery times due to customers' faster delivery demand. Autodesk was able to move forward using software as service, thinking about process, and innovating in an established company.
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We first consider the alternative "Bertrand" model of imperfect competition between two firms in which the firms set prices rather than setting quantities. Then we consider a richer model in which firms still set prices but in which the goods they produce are not identical. We model the firms as stores that are on either end of a long road or line. Customers live along this line. Then we return to models of strategic politics in which it i...more
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Before exploring the three Enlightenment traditions in particular, Professor Shapiro examines the Enlightenment holistically, using John Locke as the foundation for the discussion. The first tenet of the Enlightenment is a commitment to science as a way of ordering politics, and Professor Shapiro introduces the Cartesian philosophy of science and segues into an elucidation of the workmanship ideal, a central feature of Enlightenment thinki...more
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An introduction to the science of nonviolence, mainly as seen through the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., with emphasis on the ideal of principled nonviolence and the reality of mixed or strategic nonviolence in practice, especially as applied to problems of social justice and defense.
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Further bad aspects of death are considered, including ubiquity, or the fact that death may occur at any time and strike anyone. Professor Kagan invites students to contemplate the possibility of death-free time periods, vacation spots, and activities. Then there is consideration of the value of the human condition, which consists of life, followed by death. Finally, the question is raised as to whether it could be appropriate to refuse to...more
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