The Business of Climate Change: Investing and Managing in a Changing Environment

Columbia Business School

A half-semester MBA elective taught by:
Patrick Bolton, Kent Daniel, Geoffrey Heal and Elke Weber.

For better or worse, climate change is already affecting American and global business. Some industries will be transformed by climate change and the policies that respond to it. For example, the coal industry, a mainstay of advanced economies since the start of the industrial revolution, is already collapsing. The oil and gas industry will be radically transformed and reduced in scale. The automobile industry will be transformed, with the growth of electric vehicles leading to the entry of new players in both vehicle production and component production for the first time in half a century. Construction and real estate will also be transformed. Tourism and many other leisure activities will undergo profound changes, and agriculture is already experiencing major challenges.

This course will provide a framework for thinking about climate change and its consequences for business. The perspective taken will be that of senior executives or CEOs in industries affected by climate change. The course is intended for students who are interested in consulting careers, who are likely to encounter these issues as they move between companies and industries. It is also relevant for students interested in corporate strategy, which in many cases will be affected by the issues in the course. And for students going into fund management, who will need to think about the challenges that climate will pose for the firms that they invest in and to analyze which companies will be well-placed to cope with these. The course is also relevant for students interested in impact investing, green investing/SRI, and careers that have a direct relationship to environmental issues. It will also be of relevance to those seeking careers in the investment, consulting, or even general management area, where there will be issues relative to a firm’s or investor’s social-responsibility, or to project choice in the face of environmental impacts, that even mid-level managers will have to worry about.

The course will be taught by Patrick Bolton, Kent Daniel, Geoffrey Heal and Elke Weber. The last two sessions will be given over to student presentations and class discussions: earlier sessions will be mainly lectures with some discussion topics.

Prerequisites are managerial economics, capital markets and strategy, or instructor’s permission.

The twelve sessions will be organized as follows:

1. Scientific background – what do we know and what is uncertain about the future climate and its social and economic consequences.

2. The psychology of climate change risk perception and action: homo economicus vs. homo sapiens. How does the public perceive the issue, how does that translate into political will, formulation and implementation of mitigation and adaptation policies, and private sector action?

3. What are the policies that can respond to climate change? A review of mitigation and adaptation policies. Cap and trade, carbon taxes, renewable subsidies. What has the international community committed to?

4. Case studies of the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, the California cap and trade system, the North East States Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

5. Climate and Capital Markets

6. The Divestment Movement

7. to 10. The future of the energy, transport and infrastructure.

11. Case studies – Tesla/SolarCity/Sun Edison/a coal company/energy storage (student group presentations)

12. Synthesis (student group presentations)

WWS 594R: Topics in Policy Analysis (Second Term)

Behavioral Science in Energy and Environmental Policy
Professor Elke U. Weber

Office: Andlinger 216 and Peretsman Scully Hall 309
Phone: 646 896 9410
Email: eweber@princeton.edu

Even though numerous influential reports call for earlier and better integration of behavioral science theory and insights into the policy process, the reality is that disciplines other than economics and the law have had little or no influence on the design or implementation of environmental or technology policy. We review reasons and consequences for this failure and examine paths towards better future integration.

ENE475 / PSY475

Professor Elke U. Weber

Office: Andlinger 216 and Peretsman Scully Hall 309
Phone: 646 896 9410
Email: eweber@princeton.edu

Short Course Description

“Human Factors 1.0” studied how humans interact with machines and technology, bringing engineering and psychology into contact in the 1950s and giving rise to theories of user-centric design. This course will cover recent theoretical advances in cognitive and social psychology, especially in human judgment and decision making, that are relevant for engineers and choice architects as they address technical and societal challenges related to sustainability. Such psychological theory (“human factors 2.0”) can be creatively applied to designs decision environments that help people overcome present bias, loss aversion, and status-quo bias.

Longer Course Description

Human factors refers to the study of how humans interact with other systems, including machines and technology, and was an early way in which engineering and psychology came into contact in the 1950s, giving rise to theories of user-centric design. Signal detection theory applied psychology to the engineering problem of detecting a signal in a noisy environment, adding the element of human motivation to physical discriminability. Since then, both cognitive and social psychology have progressed, with important theoretical advances especially in the areas of human judgment and decision making that are relevant for engineers as they attempt to address technical and societal challenges related to sustainability. We will review basic theory from economics of how people ought to make decisions rationally (i.e., expected utility theory, game theory), show how actual decisions deviate from the predictions of these models, and how to account for those deviations with more complex psychological models that provide decision makers with more complex goals and a broader range of modes of processing (i.e., prospect theory, query theory, behavioral game theory).

Psychology, in turn, has much to learn from engineering. Broadly defined, engineering is the creative application of science. Yet, while such creative application is common for insights from the physical and natural sciences, the engineering approach is underused in the behavioral sciences, including psychology. Choice architecture is a step in this direction, by applying psychological insights to design decision environments that help people make choices that overcome present bias, loss aversion, and status-quo bias. Together (in class and in small groups) we will put psychological theories about human goals and information processing to work to design better interventions that target energy and environmental issues, addressed to members of the general public and to professional decision makers (e.g., engineers, architects, or city planners). We will do so by investigating how people process and deal with (complex) environmental risks (e.g., climate change), how their perceptions, judgments, emotions, and social environment influence their decisions and behavior (e.g., energy use and/or conservation, adoption of new technologies).

This course will add psychological theory and tools to engineers’ design repertoires and will point psychologists towards new ways to creatively apply their science.

Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Graduate Program

WWS 594B: Negotiations and Conflict (Second Term)

Professor Elke U. Weber

Office: Andlinger 216 and Peretsman Scully Hall 309
Phone: 646 896 9410
Email: eweber@princeton.edu

To be an effective leader, in politics, business or elsewhere, it is essential to know how to negotiate effectively. An effective manager gets work done through other people. As a result, managerial success requires not only technical expertise to find solutions to emerging problems but also the psychological, social, and political expertise to get one’s solutions accepted and implemented. Creative problem solving and effective leadership require persuasive arguments, face-saving rationales, identifying win/win solutions, crafting political coalitions, and sustaining a sense of fair process. Managing through negotiation and agreement rather than formal authority is becoming more important as organizations evolve away from command-and-control hierarchies towards flatter organizational structures. A basic theme of the course is that we negotiate all the time, not just at dramatic moments when labor strikes are averted or mergers finalized.

Both public and private sector business is increasingly conducted by and with individuals whose backgrounds, values, and beliefs can be very different from your own. This makes it critical to understand how such differences can be opportunities for joint gains rather than obstacles to agreement. Negotiating is the art and science of creating and securing an agreement between two or more interdependent parties. This is not an easy process, as the Latin root of the word “negotiation,” from negotiari (“to carry on business”) implies: neg (not) + otium (leisure) = not leisure. Negotiations involve cognitively complex and emotionally difficult interactions.

OBJECTIVES

By taking this course, you will:

· Build a repertoire of specific negotiation skills and strategies.

· Develop confidence in your negotiation ability.

· Gain insight into your own negotiation behavior.

· Increase your personal effectiveness in handling different types of negotiations.

· Improve your understanding of how individuals, groups, and organizations behave in negotiation situations.

· Understand the scientific principles underlying negotiation so that you can analyze them and continue to learn from your negotiation experiences down the road.

This course is designed to help you meet these objectives in two ways:

First, it will introduce you to a framework that identifies two stages or components in a negotiation (creating value and claiming value), and to the strategic emphasis and tactical options most effective in each stage. It will also introduce you to psychological principles that explain the effectiveness of age-old negotiation tactics, from car salesmen’s ploys to diplomatic strategies. Understanding these principles will allow us to see how these strategies can be defused or countered. These conceptual tools will allow you to generalize the lessons learned in specific class exercises to negotiation situations you may encounter in the future.

Second, the course will give you hands-on experience with negotiations through a series of cases, simulations, and negotiation exercises with other students in the class. These exercises are important, as they allow you to translate the conceptual tools you are acquiring into practice and to acquire the behavioral skills for enacting the case appropriate tactics. Many techniques depend on the psychological reactions they elicit in your negotiation counterpart, e.g., liking or trust. If not performed gracefully, they can backfire, evoking resentment and distrust instead. Also, different tactics work for different people, i.e., there is often more than one way to achieve a goal. Repeated practice is required to find your own comfort level with the range of tactics and techniques that you will encounter to accomplish the negotiation goals that you face.