Abstract:

Annually the Managerial Economics Group at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) provides managerial economics courses to more than 2.500 undergraduate students. Students performance and satisfaction is encouraging. Students performance and satisfaction is related to teachers abilities (e.g. academic competences and communicative skills). There seems also to be a positive correlation between successful course delivery and the lecturers ability to relate the course content to the business environment; i.e. the world outside the university. The latter requires a more comprehensive approach to managerial economics teaching and among others substantial use of real life business cases.

The mentioned students have enrolled on a variety of bachelor programmes. The programmes differ; e.g. in terms of number of students on each programme and the specific programme profile. The students have also somewhat heterogeneous backgrounds; e.g. in terms of experience, age and previous upper secondary education. The heterogeneity requires tailored approaches.

CBS considers competences within managerial economics mandatory to all business students; i.e. in itself as relevant competences for managerial decision making and as requirements for further business studies. Hence, managerial economics is taught on all programmes and the managerial economics learning objectives and weights in terms of ECTS are more or less identical across the range of bachelor programmes.

The fact that more or less homogenous learning objectives must be achieved for the vast number of partly heterogeneous students requires obviously somewhat tailored learning approaches. The Managerial Economics Group at CBS mainly provides these courses. Tasks related to course development, literature reviews, development of cases for teaching and exams as well as additional course material are developed and shared collectively within the group. Each course has a course responsible, who is seated within the group. Apart from the somewhat tailored learning approaches as well as lecturers fundamental academic and general teaching skills the Managerial Economics Group has identified further generic essentials for successful managerial economics course delivery, where success for instance can be measured in students performance (e.g. participation and exam results) and students satisfaction. There seems also to be a positive correlation between successful course delivery and the lecturers ability to relate the course content to the business environment; i.e. the world outside the university.

The Managerial Economics Group has found that this requires application of a more comprehensive approach for managerial decision making within the framework of the course as well as development and stringent application of real life cases. The former relates among others to extend the classical micro economics focus on the solution to discussions of relevance, assumptions, uncertainty, application and model building. The latter, i.e. case development, requires is by far the biggest task. In order to keep down costs and at the same time manage and control the content and quality of teaching and exercise material, this is developed and maintained centrally by the person being responsible for the course. And major efforts are done in order to make the course contents very similar across the individual programs at bachelor level.

Keywords:

Managerial Economics.