Business & Industrial Economics

Synthetic program:

Programma sintetico:

Efficiency, coordination, and economic organization
Why do firms and industries exist? The role of specialization, exchange, coordination; Efficient allocation of resources (general equilibrium and welfare economics); Coordination mechanisms: the invisible hand of markets and the visible hand of firms and institutions.

Competitive structures
Insights into different market forms; Concentration and concentration indices; Regulation of natural monopoly.

Market failures
Market power: allocative inefficiency; Externalities: consumption and production externalities, remedies to externalities, network externalities; Public Goods; Information asymmetries: moral hazard and adverse selection, remedies to information asymmetries: signals and incentives; Transaction costs: bounded rationality, specific investments, opportunistic behavior; Transaction costs and governance of transactions.

Oligopolistic markets
Strategic interdependence and duopolistic models; Entry barriers, entry deterrence and limit pricing; Price discrimination; The theory of contestable markets: on the conditions for potential competition and on the existence of perfectly contestable markets.

Theories of the firm and their implications
The neo-classical profit maximization assumption: critiques and alternatives; Theories of the firm: managerial theories, contractual perspectives (agency theory, property rights theory), resource- and knowledge-based theories; Determinants and insights into firm boundaries: horizontal and vertical integration, diversification, mergers & acquisitions, alliances and other intermediate forms between firm and market; Determinants of internationalization and the multinational corporation.

Technological change and innovation
Theories of technological change: the legacy of Schumpeter; Market structure and innovation; The economics of standards: hardware/software paradigm, winner-takes-all-markets and technological standard wars.

Industrial and competition policy
Classification of policies: industrial policy, regulation and antitrust; The economics of anti-trust (market power analysis, collusion and cartels, predatory pricing and exclusionary practices); The economics of ex-ante regulation (road “map” to regulation, first- and second-best solutions; asymmetric information and regulation: cost-plus, price-cap, yardstick competition); Industrial policy: approaches and experiences.