Syllabus-Firms’ Strategies and Markets (9 classes-3hours each)
Claire Chambolle
This course aims at equipping students to understand complex strategies that firms apply to maximize their profits. Emphasis is given to pricing, advertising and innovation strategies of firms in a static and/or a dynamic perspectives. The range of strategies analyzed is wide because firms operate in diverse market organizations (various competitive environment, direct sales vs indirect sales to consumers) and demand conditions (uncertainty, consumers’ heterogeneity, imperfect information of consumers about prices and products).
The methodology used is Microeconomic Theory and Industrial Organization. Each class will contain a case study 0.5 hours, 1,5 hours of theory and 1hour of exercises.
The purpose of this module is to equip students with the specialist tools to conduct quantitative economic assessments relevant to competition cases and regulatory matters. It will cover key techniques to empirically analyze markets. We will use data-driven examples from selected industries in France and internationally. The content of the course will be based on a discussion of selected academic papers to introduce the theory and their practical applications to competition and regulatory cases.
The course will combine lectures and hands-on sessions during which real industry data sets will be used to conduct econometric estimations in R. Regular homework assignments will also enable to practice independently the empirical methods taught during the lectures.
Teachers: Louis Pape (louis.pape@telecom-paris.fr) and Marc Bourreau (marc.bourreau@telecom-paris.fr)
Overview:
The overall objective of the course is to describe and analyze the functioning of the sharing (or peerto-peer) economy. This analysis will be based on factual descriptions of peer-to-peer platforms / markets in specific sectors (e.g., short-term housing market (AirBnB), for-hire transportation market (Uber, Lyft), etc.) but also on analysis using economic theory models as well as empirical analysis of some of these markets. We will aim to identify the critical features that differentiate the sharing economy from other industries, and examine the implications for business strategy.
The class will discuss topics such as platform markets, algorithms (price and recommandation), trust mechanisms used by platforms, taxation issues, impact of the sharing economy on the labor market and labor laws, the regulation of peer-to-peer platforms.
To complement the economic theory, students will present a case study (on one particular platform or sector) each week in the form of a debate. These case studies have three aims: to provide applications for the concepts developed during the class, to inform you about different industries; and to help develop your written, rhetorical and presentation skills.
Grade: The final grade is based on two presentations and a written submission.
This course introduces students to web scraping techniques, covering how to extract data from HTML, navigate both static and dynamic websites, and interact with private and public APIs. Students will also be introduced to key unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods used in econometrics, focusing on dimension reduction and detecting heterogeneity in treatment effects. The course emphasizes hands-on learning, with evaluation based on group projects where students collect data from a website of their choice and analyze the data to answer a question of scientific relevance.
