Unified by their commitment to prescriptive advice backed by the highest feasible levels of scholarship, faculty in UCLA Anderson’s Strategy area teach courses and conduct research that, as a whole, includes both computational and cognitive difficulties in policy formulation and implementation.
The problem of policy formulation concerns some of the deepest and most difficult issues that face individuals, businesses, governments and nations. On the one hand, the difficulties may reside in determining the optimal policies for handling situations with high combinatorial complexity or situations with complex stochastic structures. On the other hand, the difficulties may arise in framing the problem setting and in deciding which issues should be addressed by policy.
The majority of faculty in the Strategy area rely on economics for their primary intellectual tools, and every member of the area is expected to be literate in this field. Some area members apply other intellectual backdrops in their work, such as mathematics, cognitive psychology, political science and organizational ecology.
