Traditionally, Industrial Organization discusses the interactions of oligopolistic firms. For example, from the view of antitrust, the regulator wants to know whether a proposed merger should be allowed. One crucial factor to influence the interactions is consumers’ demand across
the products. An important theme in empirical industrial organization is to estimate demand, particularly in differentiated-product industries. We will spend most of the time on consumer’s discrete choice of products in a differentiated market. We will introduce the BLP’s (Berry,
Levinsohn, and Pakes) framework to empirically analyze this discrete choice problem. We then apply this framework to study various issues, such as price discrimination, competition of durable products, environmental policies. We will also teach programming to apply these empirical methods.