Behavioural Business Minor
We offer students the chance to obtain a minor in the area of Behavioural Business. Behavioural business refers to behavioural economics as applied to different business and policy domains.
Our minor consists of 4 courses and is currently the first of its kind in Victoria:
1. ECON1339 Behavioural Economics
This course provides you with an introduction to behavioural economics, the cutting-edge economics discipline that draws on insights and methods from other social sciences including psychology, sociology and anthropology to better understand economic and business decisions.
You will focus on new methods of enquiry and the theories and insights that they generate. The aim is to provide you with skills and knowledge to enable you to apply these methods and theories to real world economic, business and policy issues.
2. ECON1341 Psychology for Business Decisions
This course covers aspects of human psychology that are essential for business to understand the decisions of various stakeholders, including competitors, customers, shareholders, employees, partners and regulators. You will discover how people in business and the economy make decisions individually and in groups, as well how they are affected by these decisions.
The focus will be on the cognitive and social processes that underlie decision making by individuals and by businesses. Topics will include judgment, perception and attention, information processing, motivation, affect emotion, as well as attitude formation and change. Insights from these topics will be applied to practical issues across the business domain, including marketing, finance, management and strategy, and how business decision making affects society and the environment.
3. ECON1340 Strategic Games for Business
Success in business is about making good decisions. This can be very challenging under “strategic interdependence” – the influence of competitors, business partners, customers, shareholders and government on each other. This course introduces tools to address strategic choice from business economics and psychology.
Game theory provides you with the tools to recognise and understand strategic situations, to predict others’ behaviours and to design appropriate strategic and tactical responses. Psychology enriches the theory with insights about how people make strategic decisions in practice. Knowledge of these approaches helps decision makers to be better informed through systematic and evidence-based thinking. In this course, you will be introduced to these approaches and their application to business problems and managerial decision making. You will also become familiar with main theoretical concepts and tools and their application in hands-on and case-based analysis.
4. BAFI3259 Behavioural Finance
Behavioural finance focuses on the psychological influences and biases that affect the financial behaviours of investors and financial practitioners. We examine these biases, and discover where we are most susceptible to them. This course will explore the idealistic assumptions in the markets by bringing in the concepts of psychology, sociology, and behavioural finance to understand how the investor mind works in a broader societal setting. This will allow for better understanding of the investor's decision-making process. The aim is to introduce new theories of financial behaviour in a unique, interdisciplinary course encompassing areas such as financial economics and cognitive science with both experimental and theoretical components.
