Econ 171 Home Page

Industrial Organization: Theory and Tactics

Professor Thomas Hubbard


This class investigates how firms compete. It combines theory with investigations of individual industries. The central issues concern firms' choice of price, quantity, and quality in markets where the assumptions behind perfect competition do not hold. These questions apply to a wide range of disciplines other than economics, most immediately to antitrust/law and economics and business strategy.

By and large, this class takes firms as decision-making units. If you are interested in questions such as why firms exist at all and why they have the organizational features they do, this is available in another course I am teaching later this year, Econ 174: Organization of the Firm.