Yale School of Management: New Faculty and Electives Introduced for the 2019–2020 Academic Year

“Evans Hall,” by Chuck Choi, courtesy of Yale University

Yale School of Management’s mission statement notes that the school is seeking “…students who care deeply about the problems afflicting our world. We equip them with the knowledge, the resources, and the networks to pursue positive and ambitious change…” With that goal in mind, let’s take a look at some of the new electives for the 2019-2020 academic year.

There are four new courses that focus on some aspect of the current technological revolution. “Understanding Technology Disruption” (Tom Gage) directly addresses how technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are rapidly changing the economic, political, and organizational landscape, and provides an analytical framework for students. In Evangelia Chalioti’s “Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, and Markets,” students analyze the economics of innovation and the effects of AI on a variety of industries. “Connected Cities and Urban Ecosystems” (Sasson Darwish) focuses on the technological forces that are reshaping the urban ecosystem, and how these new technological advances might be used to solve urban problems of resource conservation, congestion, and pollution. Tauhid Zaman’s “Social Media Analytics” looks at the power of social media data in determining how people group together and how they can be influenced. Students learn key quantitative tools needed to analyze social media data, including neural networks, multi-armed bandits, clustering algorithms, and reinforcement learning. Zaman has just joined Yale SOM from MIT where he has written on finding online extremists in social networks, and predicting job performance based on sweat production, among many other things.

Barbara Biasi has two complementary courses that are both new. “Education Policy” introduces students to the major policies that define education in America, while “Inequality and Social Mobility” focuses on current trends in inequality and social and intergenerational mobility in the US and abroad, what the possible causes might be, and how public policies shape those trends.

Another new course, “Regulation in the Modern Economy: Theory and Practice” (Howard Shelanski and Katja Seim), looks at how regulatory policy impacts the economy from telecommunications and financial services to product safety and the environment.

In “Rollups, Consolidations and Serial Acquisitions” (A.J. Wasserstein), students examine the nature of serial acquisitions in comparison with episodic, transformational transactions, and why the former is so compelling to managers and investors. Wasserstein has personally completed 37 acquisitions in the records management industry as CEO of ArchivesOne, and 22 acquisitions in the bottleless water industry as CEO of Onesource Water.

Finally, Gal Zauberman’s “Designing Experiences and Managing Well-Being,” explores the role of experiences both in business and in people’s lives in order to design better experiences for employees, customers, and oneself.

Yale SOM is tackling the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution head on with an array of new courses, and offering students new frameworks for analyzing those challenges. What an exciting time to be at Yale!

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