Courses tagged with "Taking derivatives" (61)

Law, in its simplest form, is used to protect one party from another. For instance, laws protect customers from being exploited by companies. Laws protect companies from other companies.  Laws even protect citizens and corporations from the government. However, law is neither perfect nor all encompassing. Sometimes, societal ethics fill the voids that laws leave behind; other times, usually when societal ethics have been systematically violated by a group of the population, we write laws that are designed to require individuals to live up to certain ethical standards. In the backlash of the Enron scandal (where Enron executives used accounting tricks to hide losses) for example, new accounting laws were passed. Similarly, as a result of the financial crisis of 2008, legislators proposed new regulations designed to enforce a certain standard of ethical behavior within the financial services industry. This course will introduce you to the laws and ethical standards that managers must abide by in the course o…

In economics, the term "labor" refers to workers.  As a factor of production, labor earns wages for the services that it renders.  As such, students of labor economics have traditionally set out to understand wage formation, the level of employment, and all elements that go into the making of a wage relationship.  Over the years, the social and economic contexts in which labor markets operate have become increasingly complex; nowadays, labor economics is no longer limited to the study of wages.  Modern labor economics instead seeks to understand the complex workings of the labor market by studying the dynamics between employers, employees, and their wage-, price-, and profit-making incentives.  In other words, modern labor economics explores the outcomes of the labor market under the assumption that workers strive to maximize their wellbeing and firms strive to maximize profits.  It also analyzes the behavior of employers and employees and studies their responses to changes in government policies and/or…

Welcome to the exciting world of Payroll Administration!  What you’ll learn in this course is essential to your understanding of the human-resources concept of payroll as it is interpreted from a business perspective.  In applying the theoretical principles of the course in real-world ways, you should gain a better understanding of yourself and your work environment.  The goal of this course is to help you develop the fundamental skills critical to payroll operations, and to help you understand state and federal compliance.  This will provide you with a foundation for becoming more versed on the depth of payroll as an intricate component of human-resource management, and business overall. Fundamentally, the concept of payroll is rooted in both human-resource management and accounting principles.  From a human-resource management perspective, the concept of payroll embodies compliance, which includes the identification of the relationship between the employee and the employer.  There are a number of…

In this course, you will learn about the marketing process and examine the range of marketing decisions that an organization must make in order to sell its products and services. You will also learn how to think like a marketer, discovering that the focus of marketing has always been on the consumer. You will begin to ask, “Who is the consumer of goods and services?” What does the consumer need? What does the consumer want? Marketing is an understanding of how to communicate with the consumer, and is characterized by four activities: Creating products and services that serve consumers Communicating a clear value proposition Delivering products and services in a way that optimizes value Exchanging, or trading, value for those offerings Many people incorrectly believe that marketing and advertising are one in the same. In reality, advertising is just one of many tools used in marketing, which is the process by which firms determine which products to offer, how to price those products, and to whom th…

In this course, you will look at the properties behind the basic concepts of probability and statistics and focus on applications of statistical knowledge.  You will learn about how statistics and probability work together.  The subject of statistics involves the study of methods for collecting, summarizing, and interpreting data.  Statistics formalizes the process of making decisions, and this course is designed to help you use statistical literacy to make better decisions.  Note that this course has applications for the natural sciences, economics, computer science, finance, psychology, sociology, criminology, and many other fields. We read data in articles and reports every day.  After finishing this course, you should be comfortable evaluating an author's use of data.  You will be able to extract information from articles and display that information effectively.  You will also be able to understand the basics of how to draw statistical conclusions. This course will begin with descriptive statistic…

Math for Economists will help you assemble a toolkit of skills and techniques to solve fundamental problems in both macroeconomics and microeconomics.  The material covers both precalculus and calculus concepts and should help you identify the best approach to solving problems.  For example, an economist may be called upon to determine the right mix allocation of capital to a production process.  The tools in this course will help you evaluate the options and select from the best alternatives.  Advanced courses in economics typically utilize mathematical techniques beyond basic calculus; so, gaining practice in fundamental skills can serve as a good basis for further study.  Of note, this course applies precalculus and calculus; this is different from “applied math,” which economists typically use to refer to probability and statistics. This course begins with a survey of basic optimization tools and then applies them to solve problems over several periods in time.  These optimization tools descri…

In BUS103: Financial Accounting [1], we learned that firms are required to keep detailed financial records so that organized reports can be distributed to managers, shareholders, and government regulators.  Principles of Finance will focus on what these managers, investors, and government agencies do with this information.  It is an introductory course to various fields of finance and is comparable in content to courses that other institutions label as “corporate finance” or “financial management.” Finance is a broad term; you will find that both managers that compile the financial reports we discussed in financial accounting and stockbrokers working on Wall Street will claim that they work in finance.  So what exactly is finance?  Finance is the science of fund management.  It is distinct from accounting in that, whereas accounting aims at organizing and compiling past information, finance is geared towards deciding what to do with that information. In this course, you will be exposed to a n…

Operations management is a science with which we are all, in some capacity, familiar.  We all have scarce resources and have to allocate those resources properly.  Think about the process of preparing a meal: you have to gather all the proper ingredients and prepare them for cooking.  Certain ingredients go in at certain times.  Occasionally, you fall behind or get too far ahead, jeopardizing the entire meal.  And, of course, if you find that you do not have enough ingredients, even more problems arise.  All of these elements of meal preparation - purchasing ingredients, prepping the ingredients by dicing them up, mixing ingredients together, boiling or baking the dish, serving, and cleaning - can be seen as parts of operations management. In the realm of business, operations management is more complicated than preparing a family meal.  There may be hundreds or thousands of participants rather than just you and your brother or wife or grandfather cooking in the kitchen.  Each participant has a speci…

All managers are leaders.  All leaders are managers.  Which of these statements is true?  Neither.  The words are often confused, even in academic settings, because we think that both leaders and managers are in charge of a specific task or group of people.  However, there are many differences between the two.  One such distinction is that a manager may not be in charge of people at all.  For example, a manager may be in charge of data, including its acquisition, analysis, and dissemination.  Or consider the fact that a leader may have no formal power; many of history’s greatest leaders only had power “earned” from their peers instead of power granted by another individual or group.  Think of our country’s founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, who went against the British government to draft the Declaration of Independencethe situation created the “team,” and from that the recognized leaders emerged.  All of these distinctions will be explored in this course. Not only will this cour…

The purpose of this course is to provide you with a basic understanding of the principles of microeconomics.  At its core, the study of economics deals with the choices and decisions that have to be made in order to manage scarce resources available to us.  Microeconomics is the branch of economics that pertains to decisions made at the individual level, i.e. by individual consumers or individual firms, after evaluating resources, costs, and tradeoffs.  When we talk about “the economy,” then, we are referring to the marketplace or system in which these choices interact with one another.  In this course, we will learn how and why these decisions are made and how they affect one another in the economy. Each of the following units has been designed as a building block, where the concepts you learn in one unit will enable you to understand the material you discover in the next.  By the end of this course, you will have a strong grasp on the major issues that face microeconomists, including consumer and…

The purpose of Introduction to Human Resources Management is to provide a general overview of the concepts and applications of the many parts of Human Resources (HR).  This course is for the entry level HR Generalist who wants to explore how the interdependence of the major topics in HR are created and implemented.  Upon completion of this course, you will be able to apply your knowledge to real world HR issues.  While general topics such as benefits and compensation will be covered in other Human Resource Management courses, this course will focus primarily on the employee life cycle and each of its phases.  The employee life cycle is central to most of the functions and purposes of HR.  It is important to start at the beginning of any life cycle in an effort to understand how each component is dependent on the next. To begin with, you will take a look at the history of HR and determine the major events and champion theorists who brought HR to its humble beginnings.  The course will then cover the em…

This course introduces major theories of economic development and to place them in a historical context. In his contributory introduction “Economic Growth, Economic Development and Human Development” in The Development Economics Reader (2008), edited by Giorgio Secondi and published by Routledge, Secondi defines economic development as the “branch of economics that studies relatively poor countries.” In the same book, Mahbub ul Haq, writing under the title “The Human Development Paradigm,” suggests that the “basic purpose of development is to enlarge people’s choices,” which is in line with the views expressed by the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. Whether development is simply studying poor countries or expanding people’s choices in poor countries, one of the essential requirements is that there must be a means for making the choices available. This means that economic development must include growth, but growth can take place without economic development. Without economic growth, the choices…

This course will provide you with a comprehensive introduction to spreadsheets. The course is designed for first-time users with very little or no exposure to the subject. For this course, you will use Microsoft Excel as the software. The course will explore the following fundamental topics: an introduction to spreadsheets, terminology in Excel, components of a spreadsheet, what a cell consists of, and the creation of a spreadsheet for practical use.  You will examine sample files, videos, and books that will enable you to gain practical knowledge about spreadsheets that can be used in daily life, either at work, school, or home.

This course will introduce you to business statistics, or the application of statistics in the workplace. Statistics is a course in the methods for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data. If you have taken a statistics course in the past, you may find some of the topics in this course familiar. You can apply statistics to any number of fields from anthropology to hedge fund management because many of us best interpret data when it is presented in an organized fashion (as it is with statistics). You can analyze data in any number of forms. Summary statistics, for example, provide an overview of a data set, such as the average score on an exam. However, the average does not always tell the entire story; for example, if the average score is 80, it may be because half of the students received 100s and the other half received 60s. This would present a much different story than if everyone in the class had received an 80, which demonstrates consistency. Statistics provides more than simple averages. In t…

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge defines project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.  The temporary nature of projects indicates a definite beginning and end.  The end is reached when the project’s objectives have been achieved or when the project is terminated because its objectives will not or cannot be met, or when the need for the project no longer exists.” (PMBOK, 2008, p. 5).  The discipline of project management has various definitions.  Some describe it as a systematic method of planning and guiding a project from start to finish, while others have defined project management as a methodical approach of achieving targets and goals while optimizing the use of resources such as people, money, time, and space.  Some have referred to project management as the ability to be open and to elicit commitments through effective communication regarding how team members are willing to participate.  More specifically, the PMBOK (2008) def…

This course is designed to extend your knowledge of the basic microeconomic principles that will provide the foundation for your future work in economics and give you insight into how economic models can help us think about important real world phenomena.  Topics include supply and demand interaction, utility maximization, profit maximization, elasticity, perfect competition, monopoly power, imperfect competition, and game theory. Microeconomics is the study of rational choice behavior on the part of individual consumers and firms.  In general, economists are interested in how market mechanisms solve extremely complex resource allocation problems.  This course presents a logical and coherent framework in which to organize observed economic phenomena. Several economic "models" are developed and analyzed in order to help explain and predict a wide variety of economic (and sometimes, seemingly non-economic) phenomena.  Microeconomic theory is based on the notion that individuals (and firms) have well defin…

Have you ever wondered what qualities billionaire Warren Buffet, visionary Steve Jobs, or upcoming Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com all have in common?  After you finish studying business practices in this course, you may discover that you have some of the same qualities as other successful entrepreneurs. This course is designed as a survey course that will expose you to business terminology, concepts, and current business issues.  The intent is to develop a viable business vocabulary, foster critical and analytical thinking, and refine your business decision-making skills.  These skills will be acquired by the reading materials, exercises, and research assignments in this course that simulate the workplace today.  By delving into the five units of this course, you will be able to fine tune your direction and choice of career in business. A major goal of your education is to help you become a citizen who can contribute and compete in an increasingly global environment.  Elements of this course will focus on…

US firms maintain their competitive advantages by holding on to resources their competitors cannot obtain.  What do we mean by “resources?”  The term “resources” can refer to anything from rights to a certain oil field, the patent on touchscreen technology, or an exclusive contract with the government.  More often than not, however, a company’s most valuable resources are its employees.  Often, having the “right” employees  the individuals capable of developing iPhones or finding new oil fields  separates the highly successful firms from their less successful competitors.  As you begin the journey of this course, you might be saying to yourself, "My company may say I am its most valuable resource, but it really do not treat me like I am valued."  This feeling is one of many elements associated with managing human capital. In the United States, the subfield of Human Resource Management (alternatively known as Human Capital Management) has a history that dates back almost a century, bu…

Public Finance rests at the intersection of two disciplines: Public Economics and Public Choice.  Public Economics deals with issues of social optimality: how much of a good (or ill) does a society desire (or tolerate), and how do we incentivize producers and consumers to attain that amount?  Public economics concerns itself with externalities, which are costs that are borne by persons not involved in a market transaction.  There are both positive and negative externalities; public economists want to know how we get more of the good and less of the bad.  Public choice is the field of economics that looks into the behavior of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats and studies how they choose given different policy institutions. The field of Public Finance studies the interaction between these two disciplines, asking questions like: How do the incentives of the political actors shape the policies they craft?  How does that in turn affect the outcomes in the marketplace?  Alternately, students of Public Fi…

This is the capstone course in the Saylor Customer Service certificate program which is currently under development. CUST105 is designed to teach you about the customer service work environment, methods for successful customer relations, and career advancement tactics. Future courses in the certificate program will provide a solid knowledge base in the areas of computer skills, business communications, and best customer service practices.