PhD students must take a minimum of 46 semester credits over the course of two years, including 14 credits within the Information and Decision Sciences core courses listed below (not including IDSC 8892 or 8894) and the appropriate research methodology and supporting field courses.
8511 IDSC Conceptual Topics and Research Methods in Information and Decision Sciences (4 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent
Relationships to underlying disciplines; major research streams; seminal articles, survey literature, and major researchers. Provides framework for organizing knowledge about information and decision sciences.
8521 IDSC System Development (2 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent
Why it is hard to develop efficient/effective information systems, what can be done to improve situation. Defining efficiency/effectiveness in development process and in systems. Producing/evaluating artifacts (constructs, models, methods, tools) that enable more efficient/effective information systems to be developed.
8711 IDSC Cognitive Science (4 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent
Empirically based concepts of knowledge and reason, mental representation and conceptual systems that guide problem solving and decision making. Computational metaphor of mind drawn from psychology, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy. Implications for understanding of knowledge work.
8721 IDSC Behavioral Decision Theory (2 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent; offered alternating years
Traditional/current research. Major models/methodologies. Issues of preference, judgment, and choice under conditions of certainty/uncertainty. Seminar format.
8722 IDSC Heuristic Decision Making (2 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent; offered alternating years
How decisions are made, how knowledge is stored/used, how knowledge of variability and feedback influence decisions. Decisions at strategic, operational, individual level. Exceptional performance, pathologies of decision making. Basis for "best practice". How knowledge is managed in decisions, decision failure. Folly, normal accidents, decision problems in which individuals manipulate information to influence/deceive others.
8800 IDSC Research Seminar in Information and Decision Sciences (4 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent
Topics, which vary by semester, are selected from new areas of research, research methods, and significant issues.
8801 IDSC Research Seminar in Information and Decision Sciences (2 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent
New areas of research, research methods, issues.
8892 IDSC Readings in Information and Decision Sciences (1 - 8 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent
Readings useful to a student's individual program and objectives that are not available through regular courses.
8894 IDSC Graduate Research in Information and Decision Sciences (1 - 8 cr)
Prerequisites: Business admin PhD student or instructor consent
Individual research on an approved topic appropriate to student's program and objectives. | 
