産業組織Ⅰ

The goal of this course is to give you some insight into how markets work. After a brief review of competitive markets, the first part of the course will cover price setting by a monopolist. Topics include monopoly pricing, price discrimination, versioning and bundling. We also discuss how consumer and producer surplus compare with competitive markets. We then discuss various antitrust regulations that constrain firm behavior. Topics include horizontal (and vertical) mergers, collusion and predatory pricing. In the third part of the course, we focus on situations when, for one reason or another, markets don’t work efficiently. We will emphasize the importance of strategic behavior, as modeled by game theory. Topics include Bertrand competition, Cournot competition, product differentiation, advertising, adverse selection and moral hazard.

Some of the key concepts we will emphasize include economic incentives, marginal analysis, market efficiency (what does it mean for a market to work), strategic behavior (how to predict and respond to your rivals’ decisions), and asymmetric information (what happens when others know something you do not). My hope is that the combination of theoretical structure and practical examples will be useful for understanding policy debates and thinking critically about economic policy.