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Vlad Mares

MANAGERIAL ECONOMICS & DECISION SCIENCES
Visiting Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences

Print Overview
Vladimir Mares is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, since 2008. Prior to joining the Kellogg School of Management, Mares received his PhD at Rutgers University, NJ and taught at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include game theory, auction theory and industrial organization. Professor Mares is currently working on how to balance price and quality interests in the design of procurement auctions with differentiated suppliers. He also studies the strategic importance of jump bidding in large auctions.
Print Vita
 
Print Research
Articles
Swinkels, Jeroen and Vladimir Mares. Forthcoming. On the Near-Optimality of Second Price Mechanisms for a Class of Asymmetric Auctions. Games and Economic Behavior.
Working Papers
Swinkels, Jeroen and Vladimir Mares. 2011. On the Analysis of Asymmetric First Price Auctions.
Swinkels, Jeroen and Vladimir Mares. 2010. Comparing First and Second Price Auctions with Multiple Insiders and Outsiders.

 
Print Teaching
Full-Time / Part-Time MBA
Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DECS-433-0)

This course counts toward the following majors: Decision Sciences.

Provides frameworks for reasoning about decisions in uncertain environments. Case studies and experiments are used to motivate the importance of probabilistic reasoning to avoid the systematic biases that cloud managers' decision making. Formal probabilistic tools are introduced and their relevance to modern business issues is conveyed via cases, exercises, and class experiments. Some of the applications include: inventory management with uncertain demand, principal-agent models, herd behavior, selection bias, rare events, real options and risk. The course is self-contained, and should be of value to all students, including those with prior exposure to formal probability models.

Microeconomic Analysis (MECN-430-0)

This course counts toward the following majors: Managerial Economics.

Among the topics this core course addresses are economic analysis and optimal decisions, consumer choice and the demand for products, production functions and cost curves, market structures and strategic interactions, and pricing and non-price concepts. Cases and problems are used to understand economic tools and their potential for solving real-world problems.

Pricing Strategies (MECN-446-0)

This course counts toward the following majors: Decision Sciences, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Managerial Analytics, Managerial Economics.

This course provides students with a comprehensive framework for formulating and implementing pricing strategies. Techniques that take account of the often imprecise and uncertain information to which management has access are useded to analyze the influence of costs, demand and competition on the pricing decision. Also discussed are research methods that can complement managerial judgment and the importance of maintaining consistency with other elements of the marketing mix. Special attention is devoted to the design of pricing schemes that segment the market, such as peak-load pricing, product bundling and nonlinear pricing. The course also studies vertical pricing problems (transfer pricing, pricing and distribution), legal constraints on pricing and industrial pricing (bidding). Actual pricing schemes in various industries and selected cases are used for illustrative and analytical purposes.