Data Driven Decision Making

In Data Driven Decision Making was in Module 3, there were 2 pre-module assignments in order to get some some intuition about the usefulness of instrumental variables. I needed to read 2 articles, and a short explanation about “instrumental variables“. The class syllabus said it would be a blend of real-would cases with data work and out of class, in order to learn how to think as an applied scientist. The skill set can be useful for career in business managers, policy makers and strategists. The interesting part of me was that I would be able to learn how to differentiate between correlation and causation in more mathematic approach. I would say this subject was a continuation of “Digital Marketing” in Module 1, which I studied about “econometrics”, including advanced econometrics techniques and experimental design.

Pre-Module

There were 2 articles which were “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press by Jeremiah Dittmar” and “The Internet and Racial Hate Crime: Offline Spillovers from Online Access”. These 2 articles were not long. They only had 34 and 23 pages respectively, and had a lot of tables. It did not take much time to finish the reading, so I had more time to explore more possibly related topics I would study in the class, and I found a few useful video explaining about “instrumental variables“.

In-Class Session

Initially I thought it would be a lot about economics, but actually it was more about operation, which relates to “Decision Model” in module 2. There are calculations about maximising resources, which I used solver in MS Excel. Other than that I used a little bit of STATA in an in-class group exercise for econometrics.