B1799 - Industrial Organization

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course students get an understanding of how macroeconomic and industry conditions determine the evolution of the global economic environment by analyzing and understanding economic and industry data

Course contents

This course introduces a series of topics related to firm strategies and pricing, that will later be recalled in the companion course of Behavioral Economics. Such topics will be analysed, here, through the lens of the mainstream economic theory. In the subsequent course, a parallel will be proposed, tackling the same topics yet from a novel perspective, combining elements of economics and psychology to understand how and why people behave when facing real world sistuatuons.

 

The course is stuctured around four main pillars:

1. Basics of competition strategies

• Basics of game theory (strategic interaction and best reply strategies)
• Price competition and product differentiation
• Sequential games with strategic interaction
  

2. Sources of market power

• Horizontal differentiation
• Vertical differentiation
• Advertising

3. Pricing strategies

• Price discrimination with observable consumer characteristics
• Price discrimination in the lack of observable consumer characteristics

4. Information asymmetries

• Asymmetric information, moral hazard and adverse selection
• Price and advertising signals

Readings/Bibliography

Slides and other teaching materials will be made available on virtuale.unibo.it since the beginning of the course.

Textbook: Belleflamme, Paul, and Martin Peitz, “Industrial organization: markets and strategies”, Cambridge University Press, 2015. Chapters 3,4,5,6,8,9,12,13

Teaching methods

Traditional lecture, problem sets, and teamworks.

Assessment methods

One written exam over the entire program, worth up to 20/30 points and consisting of multiple choice questions and a very short essay on a topic selected by the student between two or more proposals.

For attending students, the remaining 10/30 points are appointed based on the evaluation of in-class participation, teamworks and problem sets.

For non-attending students, the remaining 10/30 points are instead appointed based additional questions to address in a sort of extended version of the final written exam.


The grade is graduated as follows:
<18 failed
18-23 sufficient
24-27 good
28-30 very good
30 e lode excellent

Teaching tools

Materials will be uploaded on the course page on the Moodle platform (http://virtuale.unibo.it )

Office hours: by appointment (please contact the instructor by e-mail)

Office hours

See the website of Stefano Antonio Bolatto