COMM 190 - Introduction to Quantitative Decision Making (formerly COMM 290)

COMM 190 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 COMM 190 will also be extensively used in the Business Statistics course, COMM 191.

Corequisite: One of MATH 100, MATH 102, MATH 104, MATH 110, MATH 120, MATH 180, MATH 184.

Note: This course was formerly numbered as COMM 290. If you've successfully completed the course as COMM 290, you are not permitted to take it again as COMM 190 (you cannot receive credit for the same course twice).