課程概述Course Description

This mini course demonstrates how basic economic principles and game theory can be applied to analyze business strategy and understand competition dynamics. Basic economic principles refer to profit maximization, price discrimination, and economies of scale and scope. Game theory is a branch of mathematics/economics concerned with the analysis of strategies for dealing with situations where the outcome depends critically on the actions of all participants. Game theory can be highly abstract and mathematical, but this course will only focus on its applied side. In particular, we are interested in incorporating business fundamentals and economic principles into a stylized game theoretical framework to conduct simple market analysis. Three main topics will be covered:
1. Horizontal and vertical boundaries of the firm
2. Market structure and competition
3. Dynamic Pricing
We will implement case-based learning in this course: For each topic, several case studies will be presented and discussed to help you better understand how theoretical concepts can be applied to analyze real business scenarios. There is one caveat though: To some extent, we sacrifice some rigorousness to conciseness in this crash course.