BERGAMO
Overview
Date/time interval
Syllabus
Course Objectives
The course contributes to the training objectives of the bachelor program with regard to the area of Economics, particularly with reference to topics related to Industrial Economics, by helping to improve knowledge and understanding of the estimation of the production and efficiency of firms, market strategies in service sectors, and business regulation. Regarding new skills in applied knowledge, the goal is to provide techniques for empirical estimates of economic models of firms' production, costs, and efficiency and for analyzing their market behavior. New knowledge of estimation techniques that make microeconomic models applicable and derived from models of Industrial Economics and Organization will be acquired. Through the use of R software, the course presents techniques for estimating the productivity of enterprises. The course also presents strategies that firms with market power can adopt in order to maximize the return on business investment. Topics range from models for pricing decisions (consumer discrimination, bundling and joint selling), anticompetitive behavior (collusion, entry deterrence and firm mergers and/or acquisitions), mergers and acquisitions, and vertical relationships. The objective is to develop the skills necessary to conduct interpreting the market strategies of firms and the consequences for the collective welfare. At the end of the teaching, the student has the basic knowledge to define the relevant economic models related to the market strategies of especially large, market-influencing firms and their consequences in terms of collective welfare.
Course Prerequisites
Knowledge of Microeconomics, Elements of Mathematics, Statistics
Teaching Methods
The course consists of lectures, numerical exercises, and sessions with R using laptops. Theoretical lectures provide general knowledge and models for interpreting firms' market strategies. Exercises are numerical exercises to apply economic theory and understand model implementation. R sessions are dedicated to estimate production and costo economics using real data. These sessions are led by the instructor and involve writing codes in R and estimating production and cost functions
Assessment Methods
The assessment of preparation takes place through a written exam, consisting of a numerical exercise to be solved and an open question. The exercise and open question are graded on a scale of 15/30 for the open question and 17/30 for the exercise. The final grade is the arithmetic mean of the three assessments. The numerical exercise is an application of industrial economics and organization (IO) models.
Students may divide the assessment into two parts: the first part is a written exam consisting of an exercise based on the application of IO models and an open-ended question on the same topics. The second part relates to the R sessions on the estimation of production and cost functions and consists of the creation and delivery of a product in R. The first part accounts for 2/3 of the assessment and the second part for 1/3. The final grade is the weighted average of the grades obtained in the two parts. The R part of the project must be submitted by the end of the second semester by uploading it to the e-learning platform.
Contents
The main contents are:
- costs for multiproduct enterprises
- market structure and market power
- price discrimination
- product differentiation
- collusion and antitrust
- mergers
- vertical relationships
- production functions in R
- cost functions in R
Online Resources
More information
For sessions with R, it would be appropriate to attend them with a notebook. In its absence, the instructor will consider how to provide the tool to the student without it.