Market Analysis with Econometrics and Machine Learning

Formerly: Empirical Industrial Organization and Consumer Choice

Note that you cannot take this course if you have already taken the course Empirical Industrial Organization and Consumer Choice.

This Master level course explores methods to model and empirically estimate the behavior of consumers and the strategic interactions of firms. The methods are useful in a wide field of applications. Here are some examples:

Marketing and Firm Strategy, for determining optimal prices and product features and predicting competitor’s reactions
Competition policy, e.g. predicting the effects of a merger on market outcomes and total welfare
Planning of public projects, e.g. predicting the demand of a new public transportation route
Environmental policy, determining the effects of subsidies or taxes on consumer behavior
International trade, predicting the effects of changes in tariffs and exchange rates on imports and exports in specific markets

A large part of the course consists of analyzing data, models, and methods using the freely available statistical programming language R.

You don't need previous knowledge of R, but it might be helpful. To help you to understand the concepts and their implementation in R better, we use several interactive R problem sets. They allow you to directly check your solution on your own computer and provide immediate feedback on whether your code is correct and provide hints. While solving these sort of problem sets should be fun in itself, we also add some extrinsic incentives: active participation in solving the problem sets counts up to 10% of the final grade.