NCCE 5020 - Microeconomics for Management

Fall. 2.5 credits. Letter grades only (no audit).

Enrollment limited to: students enrolled in the Cornell Executive MBA Metro New York Degree program. Offered in New York City at Cornell Tech.

C. Raymond.

Regardless of your specific area of work, as a manager, it will be imperative for you to understand the incentives that people face and how they are likely to respond when constraints change. A good understanding of microeconomics will give you a competitive advantage. The purpose of this course is to provide you with a broad range of basic microeconomics models. The models will first be applied to a wide range of general applications, and then the focus will be narrowed to business and management.

The first sections of the course will introduce opportunity cost, supply, and demand. Together supply and demand form one of the most powerful models of human behavior. The model of supply and demand will be used to explain a wide range of individual and firm behavior. Additionally, the model will be used to investigate the potential benefits and costs of government intervention in the market.

The second section of the course introduces the model of perfect competition. The model of perfect competition will be used to investigate the price and quantity dynamics in both the short and long runs for firms associated with free entry. A strategy will be developed for managers and investors in perfectly competitive industries. Finally, firm short and long run behavior will be investigated in the presence of profits and new entrants to a market.

Following perfect competition, the monopoly section will introduce profit maximizing behavior by firms facing a downward sloping demand curve. The monopoly section will include various ways to prevent competitors from entering the market, and various pricing strategies to exploit firm market power.

The final section will introduce oligopoly and game theory. Oligopoly describes the situation where an industry is supplied by a small number of relatively large firms. The important point is that each firm can affect all other firms in the industry by behaving appropriately or not. In order to investigate it will be necessary to cover some of the basic concepts in game theory for both cooperative and competitive situations.