Economics for Business Decision-Making - ECN 620

Economics deals with real world issues; microeconomic analysis is the heart of economics and the key to its application in the world of business. From this perspective, this course introduces MBA students to the application of economic models and economic reasoning to making managerial decisions in both the private and public sectors. Topics include, but are not limited to, optimization techniques, market structures, and pricing models. Demand estimation and forecasting (e.g., exponential smoothing, time series decomposition, regression models), production and technology (e.g., production functions, three important measures of production, three stages of production, optimal combination of inputs, isoquant/ isocost, returns to scale, Cobb-Douglas production functions), cost analysis for business decisions: explicit and implicit costs, opportunity cost, relevant costs for business decisions, costs result from production, short-run production and costs, short-run costs per unit of output, costs in the long-run, economies/diseconomies of scale, break- even analysis market structure and pricing, and perfect/imperfect competition models. The economies of investment and finance: risk/ uncertainty, probability concepts and the expected value, measurement of risk, risk aversion and risk preference, risk and capital budgeting, risk-adjusted discount rate and certainty equivalent factors, decision trees, game theory, and decisions under uncertainty; further analysis of pricing decisions.