School Notes: School of Management
July/August 2020

New raw case studies COVID-19 impact

Yale SOM MBA students, who completed the final course in the school’s integrated core curriculum this spring, tackled a brand-new raw case addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

The case, which examines the pandemic’s effect through marketing and microeconomic lenses, was a last-minute addition to The Executive, the capstone course that ties together lessons that students learn as they move through the integrated core curriculum.

Two faculty members conceived of the case: Ravi Dhar, the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing and director of the Center for Customer Insights; and James Levinsohn, director of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the Charles W. Goodyear Professor in Global Affairs.

Professor brings operations research tools to local COVID-19 decisions

Decision makers at Yale, Yale New Haven Health, and the State of Connecticut used mathematical models developed by Edward Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research and a professor of public health and engineering, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kaplan’s work, which provides rigor and context to the questions around the pandemic, built on an initial model he created from some of the first data to come out of Wuhan, China. He then expanded the model to help understand the role of various intervention strategies in the spread of the disease.