COMM 290 Introduction to Quantitative Decision
Making
Commerce 290 provides an introduction to modeling, analyzing, and
solving business decision problems under certainty and uncertainty. By
developing good modeling skills, students will be able to solve and
begin to develop managerial insight, in a variety of common and not so
common problems that arise in
today’s business settings. The course also develops concepts of
uncertainty, probability and simulation which are the foundation of many
business problems.
The course opens with an introduction to modeling. Linear programming models are introduced and
used to formulate a variety of problems of optimal allocation of
resources, arising in such functional areas as Marketing, Production, Logistics and
Financial Management. The computer package Microsoft Excel will be used
to solve and analyze linear programming formulations in most of these
examples.
In the second part of the course, we briefly introduce simulation, which
is a methodology used to analyze complex decision problems. We also use
simulation to introduce some fundamental tools needed for dealing with
uncertainty: concepts of probability and random variables. These
concepts are then used to analyze decision problems under uncertainty.
The material on probability and random variables covered in Commerce 290
will also be extensively used in the Business Statistics course,
Commerce 291.
