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Courses - Spring 2025
BDBA
Doctor of Business Administration
Open Seats as of
02/01/2025 at 09:30 PM
BDBA803
Causal Methods in Business Research
Credits: 3
Grad Meth: Reg
Restriction: Must be in Doctor of Business Administration (BDBA) program; or permission of BMGT-Robert H Smith School of Business.
Causal inference is required to answer diverse substantive questions: How does the demand for a product change when the price does or the online ratings do? How can we measure whether introducing technology in schools, universities and/or classrooms affects the performance of students? How will different IT-enabled features on digital platforms impact user behavior, engagement, and purchase? Many companies and governmental agencies ask and try to answer these questions of this type -which require causal inference--every day. This course introduces the fundamentals of causality and the appropriate language to ask and answer causal questions in a business context. The course materials focus on the ideas and on the intuition behind the fundamental tools used to measure causal effects, some hands-on work to get exposure to implementing these methods, as well as the ethical and regulatory issues around experimentation.