ETC021 - INFORMATION ECONOMICS AND PRICING

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The course aims to provide students with the tools to: analyze the factors that shape firms’ organizational and market choices; identify and examine how firms’ competitive strategies interact with market structures and assess the outcomes of this interaction. In the module “Economics of Information and Pricing,” particular attention is paid to incomplete and asymmetric information, transaction costs, and the mechanisms through which firms shift competitive pressure away from price toward other variables (quality/versioning, bundling/tying, subscriptions, peak-load), as well as to the conditions enabling price discrimination and, prospectively, to welfare implications and public intervention aimed at correcting market failures.
EXPECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDINGBy the end of the course, students will have the knowledge to:

analytically assess how the degree of competition and the presence of market power influence pricing policies;
understand the role of information (complete/incomplete) and transaction costs in pricing decisions;
distinguish between non-uniform prices, nonlinear prices, and price discrimination (I, II, III degree) and evaluate their conditions of applicability;
analyze the effects on surplus and efficiency of instruments such as coupons and self-selection, versioning and quality differentiation, bundling/tying, subscriptions, and peak-load pricing.

APPLYING KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDINGBy the end of the course, students will be able to:

connect firms’ microeconomic behavior (profit objective, informational constraints) to the competitive characteristics of the markets in which they operate;
apply the concepts of elasticity, marginal revenue, and market power to the interpretation of observable pricing practices (including in tourism-cultural settings);
identify critical issues and trade-offs in imperfectly competitive market structures in the presence of incomplete information and limits to resale.

MAKING JUDGEMENTSBy the end of the course, students will be able to:

select and evaluate relevant data, methodological tools, and interpretive models suited to pricing analysis in contexts with incomplete information;
formulate independent judgements on welfare effects and policy implications of different pricing practices, and collect and interpret evidence to support those judgements.

COMMUNICATION SKILLSBy the end of the course, students will have developed the ability to:

use the language of information economics and industrial organization appropriately;
present and discuss rigorously the mathematical and graphical foundations of pricing models (including relationships among price, marginal revenue, elasticity, and surplus).

LEARNING SKILLSBy the end of the course, students will have developed learning skills enabling them to autonomously deepen and expand their knowledge and competencies for further study and entry into the labor market, with particular attention to a critical reading of pricing practices in markets with imperfect information.