Behavioral AI Foundations for Business

This unit introduces core concepts at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and data-driven business decision-making. Students will learn to translate business questions into analyzable behavioral problems, recognize patterns with basic models and algorithms, and evaluate the historical and ethical context of behavioral interventions to prepare for applied modeling and deployment in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze business problems to formulate clear behavioral research questions and identify relevant data sources, biases, and intuitive heuristics.
• Apply basic models and algorithmic approaches to detect and interpret patterns in consumer behavior and map findings to behavioral economic principles.
• Demonstrate synthesis of psychological, economic, and analytic insights by designing a short customer-centric intervention prototype (e.g., a nudging strategy) aligned with measurable business objectives.
• Evaluate the historical development and ethical implications of behavioral interventions and AI-driven analytics, and propose mitigation strategies for bias, privacy, and unintended consequences.