BDBA803

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.