Revealed Preferences of Business Students at a Major State University

ABSTRACT: Business schools are facing a rapidly changing environment as new technology and alternative delivery systems erode barriers of time and place. The authors analyze the practices for determining curricula and courses offered by a major state university's business school and conclude that the school operates as a command economy. Such a structure produces artificial demand for some courses and obfuscates the measurement of true student preferences. The authors propose that, at least for full-capacity courses, enrollment should be replaced as a demand measure by one based on attempts to enroll. The authors' demand measure provides significantly different results from the traditional enrollment measure. The authors' results also provide insight into the relative preferences of students for different courses at the business school and the factors affecting these preferences, with some positive implications for the risk management and insurance discipline.