ECON 3351 Pricing and Strategy

This course teaches students how to makestrategic pricing decisions based on data analysis and empirical models from the literature on industrial organization. The main objective of the class is that students learn how to analyze real-world datasets to answer concrete business questions, such as: How should airline companies set prices on different routes? How should a large fashion company allocate its advertising budget across different marketing channels? How would a merger between two beverage producers affect their own and their rivals prices and profits? The course is structured into five parts. The first part of the class is a refresherof basic models of imperfect competition that will be used throughout the class. The second part focuses on estimating costand production functions using firm-level input and output data. The third part focuses on estimating demandfunctions for homogeneous goods, using market-level price and quantity data. The fourth part focuses on estimating demand functions for differentiated goods, using market-level price and quantity data. The fifth part uses the tools from the previous sections to discuss advanced pricing topics, such as price discrimination, dynamic pricing, and horizontal mergers.