Strategic Decisions and Competition

Contents & Objectives:

After successful completion of this class, the students should be familiar with industrial organization models that can be used to shape managerial strategy and aid in making decisions in strategic situations. Especially, by making use of simple two stage games, they should be able to formulate dynamic policies in a wide variety of strategic situations. The students will acquire an intuitive understanding of the underlying economic mechanisms which emerge from the analysis of game theoretic models of competition. They will become familiar with a wide variety of pricing strategies and market segmentation methods as well as non-price strategies firms may use. Moreover, they will acquire skills which enable them to make predictions in strategic situations by making use of simple mathematical models. By means of completing case based exercises, they will learn to transform real life business situations to an appropriate economic model. Based on an analysis of this model, they will be able to devise optimal strategies and derive the corresponding managerial implications.

More information in the Syllabus.