Upon successful completion of the course students will:

• Understand the core theoretical streams  within the field of the Economics of Industrial Organization
• Know the basic measures of market concentration and be able to use appropriate methods for their estimation
• Identify business policies that compose and support business strategies and goals
• Evaluate the determining factors of business performance and growth
• Know the key elements and components of industrial dynamics
• Identify the role of market structure in promoting the entrepreneurial mind
• Analyze how both price and non-price competition between business entities affect economic welfare.
• Analyze and evaluate models of competitive, oligopolistic and monopolistic markets

• Introduction: Markets and industries taxonomy, The SCP paradigm, the endogeneity issue, Chicago Approach, Loss of social welfare, Firms Objectives, Types of Firms
• Games and Strategy: Dominant Strategies, Dominated Strategies, Nash Equilibrium, Strategic form, Incomplete information, Dynamic games, Trees, Backward solution, solution refinement, repeated games
• Concentration and Market Power, Oligopoly: Bertrand Model, Cournot Oligopoly, Stackelberg model, Model of conjectural variations. Empirical estimation of concentration and market power Static measures of concentration, Dynamic concentration, Basic elements of collusive behavior
• Entry, Exit and Industrial Dynamics: Entry costs and market structure, Endogenous and exogenous entry cost, barriers to entry, static and structural, economies of scale and MES, Economies of Scope, Contestable markets, Mergers and Acquisitions, Routinized and Entrepreneurial Technological regimes, empirics of entry and exit.
• Business Practices-Pricing: Price discrimination of first, second and third order, restrictive entry pricing, predatory pricing, non-linear pricing, vertical relationships, retailers competition, double optimization, investment externalities
• Business Practices – Product differentiation: Chamberlin model, Hotelling model, horizontal and vertical differentiation, Product proliferation, Brand name and customers loyalty
• Business Practices – Advertising: Information, persuasion and marking, advertising intensity, Dorfman-Steiner model, social benefit and advertising cost, convenient and non-convenient goods, Porter’s approach and the role of retailers
• Business Practices – R&D and innovation: The Shumpeterian hypotheses, The role of firm size and market structure, Opportunity and appropriability, systems of patents, diffusion models, networks and externalities, market pull and demand push hypotheses
• Business Performance and Growth: Performance measures, measures of structure, SCP econometric models, Gibrat law, extended versions of Gibrat law

Lectures (3 hours per week)

Written examination at the end of the semester based which includes:

• Questions of multiple choice type
• Questions of short answer type
• Comparative evaluation

ICT in teaching and communication with students (e-class)