Upon successful completion of the course the student will be able to:

• Understand specific theoretical streams within the field of the Economics of Industrial Organization and Business Economics
• Identify business policies that compose and support business strategies and goals
• Evaluate the determining factors of business performance and growth
• Know the key elements and components of industrial dynamics
• Identify the role of market structure in promoting the entrepreneurial mind
• Analyze how both price and non-price competition between business entities affect economic welfare.
• Understand the concept of Data and the potential it has for economic analysis in the field of applied Industrial Organization and Business Economics
• Relate the economic theory with specific datasets and understand how to include in economics models variables
• Estimate econometric models using R & STATA adapted to the course material
• Evaluate the results and implement their estimations in the proposed framework.

Course outline

• Production, Technology and cost functions (Basic definitions)
• Production, Technology and cost functions (Using linear programming to estimate efficiency)
• Production, Technology and cost functions (Translog production, cost, profit, functions and estimation of efficiency)
• Production, Technology and cost functions (Productivity, technological, technical and scale change)-Olley Pakes
• Survival and Firm size
• Market Performance (Profitability and Growth)
• Price in established market, price discrimination and pricing in a new product
• Market structure, entry and exit
• Business Strategy-Advertising (Advertising and price competition, advertising intensity, uncertainty in advertising)
• Business Strategy-Innovation and R&D (Role of R&D in competition, incentives for R&D and innovation)

Lectures (3 hours/week) and Tutorials (1 hours/week)

The assessment is based on student’s performance in the written final examination (60%) and on their grade (40%) in 5 exercises/ projects that need to be delivered approximately every 2 weeks.

The written final examination aims to examine if students understand the topics analysed in the class  and how the economic theory proposed is sued in applied research.

All exercises require: 1) studying a set of papers 2) implementing scripts in STATA and R that analyse the dataset handed out depending on the topic analyzed per week 3) writing a report discussing the results and comparing these with the results reported in the contemporary literature.

Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) (e.g. power point) in teaching. The lectures for each chapter are uploaded on the e-class platform in the form of ppt files, selective articles which the enrolled students can freely download.

Use of source code in R and STATA to demonstrate and hands-on approach to course content assessments.

Use of the e-learning platform of the University of Patras (eclass.upatras.gr) for:

• organization and distribution of notes
• preparing weekly electronic exercises (quizzes) for understanding the material and evaluating students
• announcement and delivery of group assignments.
• communication with students.
• Use of open courses as supplementary educational material.