To provide formal tools, both quantitative and qualitative, for decision aid, in complex social, political, environmental or economic systems. To provide students with the ability to formulate and structure, using a systemic approach, a problem, to build models, to analyze and evaluate possible alternative decisions, and to manage the activities required to implement the decisions taken.

Syllabus
1. Problems and problem structuring methods
- Decision-making processes.
- Systems analysis and critical systems thinking .
- Dynamic analysis of systems.
- Self-reinforcing cycles, flows and levels.
2. System Dynamics
- System dynamics' language.
- levels, flows and delays.
- Examples (environmental sustainability, action-reaction processes, a model of "price war", ...).
3. Cooperation, competition and exploitation
- A model of production and allocation of resources.
- Elements of game theory, Nash equilibrium.
- The prisoner's dilemma and applications.
- The Tragedy of the Commons.
4. "Social Choice" and voting theory
- Orders and preferences.
- Condorcet and Borda voting and their variants.
- Arrow's impossibility theorem and its consequences.
- Consensus methods.
5. Electoral Systems
- Legislative apportionment and proportional representation: greatest-remainder method, divisor methods, …
- Definition of electoral districts.
- Some paradoxes.
- Analysis of some electoral systems.
6. Analysis and evaluation of projects
- Cost-benefit analysis: variants and limitations.
- Cost effectiveness analysis.
- Multi-criteria analysis.
- ELECTRE methods.
7. Indices and measures
- Measures and quantitative information: quality, uncertainty and subjectivity.
- Development indices.
- Inequality indices.
- Human Development Index.