Advanced industrial organization

The goal of the course is to present students with key concepts and tools on the evolution of the firm and the market. By combining theory and practice, the course will cover the major areas of advanced industrial organization such as markets' concentration, entry decisions, diversification and impact of economies of scale. A section of the course will be devoted to the deployment of quantitative methods. Guest lectures with entrepreneurs, managers and consultants will provide students with practical examples to connect them with the job market.

At the end of the course students will know the main theoretical and applied approaches to the analysis of different market structures. The focus will be, in particular on oligopolistic markets, that is the prevailing market structure in the real world.
The students will also acquire knowledge about the evolution of different markets, with particular reference to the manufacturing sector. Additionally, they will be able to delve into the relationship between market structure and innovation. In this regard, they will learn how structure affects innovation, as well as the reverse causality hypothesis, that is how innovation affect the evolution of market structure across different contexts.