Economics: Competition, Elasticity, a little Game Theory
What you'll learn
- Apply Game Theory to decide whether to be adversarial or co-operative in real-life situations
- Determine how best to price products or services that you are selling
- Decide the kind of cost structure a firm or enterprise should have, relative to its competitive landscape
- Model demand, supply and the effects of income, government regulations and technology
Requirements
- This course assumes no prior knowledge of economics, finance or accounting
Description
This is a zoom-in, zoom-out, connect-the-dots tour of Game Theory, Competition and the Elasticity of Demand andSupply.
Let's parse that
- 'connect the dots': Economics is deep - even the simplest concepts in Micro-Econ 101 are missed by leaders in business and politics, and commit basic errors in judgment. This course makes sure that won't happen to you.
- 'zoom in': Getting the details is very important in economics - you really have to understand the nitty-gritty of graphs and intersecting curves and lines. There is a lot of meaning in those details
- 'zoom out': The real value of economics, particularly microeconomics, is in taking seemingly over-simplified models, and then applying insights from those over-simplified models to the world at large. This course makes sure you can go from the specific to the general.
What's Covered:
- Game Theory: Discounting and price wars, Prisoner's dilemma and nuclear arms races, Winner-takes-all games and the commercialization of sport.
- Competition: Perfect competition, monopoly and monopolistic competition
- Firm Costs: The deep meaning underlying total and marginal costs, and the least-cost principle
- Utility and Consumer Equilibrium: Indifference curves, and relating price and value. Income effects, and deriving Demand curves from indifference curves
- Applications of Elasticity: Modeling taxes, the troublesome economics of agriculture, minimum wages.
- Elasticity, Demand and Supply: Defining and using elasticity. Linear Demand Curves and a neat trick. Demand and Supply demystified.
Who this course is for:
- Yep! Business majors and aspiring MBAs
- Yep! Finance professionals who are rusty on economics, and its role in how firms compete and operate
- Yep! Strategy professionals looking for a theoretical grounding in concepts like game theory and elasticity
- Yep! Aspiring entrepreneurs eager to understand how to react to competition
Instructor
Loonycorn is us, Janani Ravi and Vitthal Srinivasan. Between us, we have studied at Stanford, been admitted to IIM Ahmedabad and have spent years working in tech, in the Bay Area, New York, Singapore and Bangalore.
Janani: 7 years at Google (New York, Singapore); Studied at Stanford; also worked at Flipkart and Microsoft
Vitthal: Also Google (Singapore) and studied at Stanford; Flipkart, Credit Suisse and INSEAD too
We think we might have hit upon a neat way of teaching complicated tech courses in a funny, practical, engaging way, which is why we are so excited to be here on Udemy!
We hope you will try our offerings, and think you'll like them :-)