Calling all Tepper Fall 2010 Applicants

Basically you are in a team of 5 students. First, the people in the class vote on who the team presidents are. If you want to become president, you put a little blurb about why you'd make a good one, submit your candidacy, and everyone sees it. If you do not want to become president, you don't put any blurb, and don't submit your candidacy. Everyone has 3 votes for president. The presidents choose their teams via a private snake draft. Their teammates get titles (Ex: VP Finance, VP Marketing, VP Accounting, VP Ops, etc). There were about 10 teams in my class.

Then you are put in charge of a fictional company, competing with 4 other teams in their own world. You start at year 5, and all the other teams are equal at that point. (The balance sheet and product prices / quality are all equal.) Years 1-4 have already been simulated for you, so you can run regression analysis on past data, etc. Some of the other teams are from other schools in other countries. You are selling 2 products (one is a premium product and one is a mass-produced product) in 6 different countries, each with their own different elasticities to price, quality, and marketing. You don't know these elasticities.

The team sets the inputs (Price of product, Quality is set by $$ spent on R & D - you don't know the exact relationship, and $$ Spent on Marketing) for each product before each period. (Each period is a simulated quarter, and there are 12 periods). Depending on your inputs and the inputs of the other teams in your world, you could do "better" or "worse" than them for each period. You can also move production of those products to any of these 6 countries, and depending on where your factories are, the cost to make / quality of the product will be different. For example if you move the factory for product 1 from Germany to China, the cost to make it is cheaper but the quality of the product is lower. So you might have to spend more on R & D to keep up with the other teams in your world.

At the end of each "year", you also have to report your performance to the board of directors (external group of people chosen for you, usually they took the course some years back). What else...there's a stock market where you can buy/sell shares of the companies in your world as well as all of the other worlds in the class. You can declare dividends to shareholders (your classmates). Since you are selling products in 6 different countries, you can also do currency hedging to hedge the fluctuations in the exchange rates. I didn't take the MBA version but the prof. did say it was a bit different - for example you can do LBOs / hostile takeovers of companies (other teams) that are doing terrible. I'm sure your classmates would like that...

Let me know if you have any questions. There's some more which I probably don't remember now, but your questions could help me remember.

The class is very comprehensive...most classes have a 1-2 page syllabus. The syllabus for this class was something like a 50-page booklet...