Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 3 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Course Goals

This course is designed to teach students how to price goods and services.

Lecture Notes

Each lecture has accompanying notes. These notes are designed so students do not have to take copious notes and consequently will be able to focus on learning and reflection during lectures.

Textbook

I have written my own notes because I do not believe that current textbooks are "quantitative" enough to sufficiently teach practical pricing. Therefore students should take the lecture notes as the effective textbook for the course.

However, there are textbooks that are good for getting a holistic feeling for the subject. For example,

Nagle, Thomas T, and John Hogan. The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005. ISBN: 9780131856776.

Forming Teams for Case Analysis and Group Presentations

I would like you to form teams of three to analyze cases and prepare a group presentation. An ideal way to form a team would be to identify teammates who want to work on a similar topic area for the group project.

You should discuss cases with your team prior to class. In particular, you should answer the case questions which are found in the Assignments section of this course. As you know, there are rarely right answers to cases. In pricing there tend to be a few more wrong answers, but the right answer depends on the assumptions you make about facts not presented in the case. You should therefore be clear about your assumptions during case discussions.

Each team member must make a substantial contribution to the assignment. It is not, for example, acceptable to divide the assignments amongst the team members (e.g., part of the team does one case and another member does another case). The team may not collaborate with other students outside of the team.

Class Discussion

Class participation is up to 28% of your grade. It reflects the extent to which your participation in the class benefits the other class members. To gain full credit, you should read all of the cases and come to class with a series of comments that you think will be interesting to the class.

Grading

If you choose to do the final, it will be worth a maximum of 28 points and it will substitute in for your class participation scores (if it is higher).