This EMBA core course focuses on the problem of business decisions, making extensive use of cases. Topics include basic supply-demand theory and marginal analysis, the structure of decision problems, the impact of the market setting (i.e., competitive, oligopolistic or monopolistic structures) and strategic interactions among firms using game theory. The emphasis throughout is on the use of economic reasoning to solve actual business decision problems.
This course is a PhD-level introduction to political economy. The first part of the course is mostly theoretical and covers the most widely used models in economics in topics such a social choice, direct and indirect democracy, accountability models, lobbying, redistributive politics, and comparative politics. The second part of the course is a mix of abstract theory, applied theory and empirical work, and it covers some of the most research-active areas in political economy, such as mass media and endogenous institutions.
This course is an introduction to Game Theory. Our goal is to learn the basic conceptual tools from Game Theory and identify some real-life business situations where these tools can be useful to a manager. The games presented and solved in class go to the essence (often in the simplest framework possible) of particular aspects of strategic interaction that arise in real-life situations. To understand the similarities between these simple games and the many situations that arise both in business and in our daily economic lives, the course provides applications of the theory to business and economics.