Economic Analysis for Business & Strategic Decisions

After completing this course you should be able to:

• Define the concept of time value of money;
• Recognize the difference between value maximization and profit maximization;
• Identify profit-making motives for companies;
• Recognize how marginal analysis is used for business decisions;·
• Identify how a derivative is used in economic analysis;
• Recognize the characteristics of a mathematical concepts in optimization techniques;
• Recognize different goals for economic optimization;
• Recognize factors that affect the demand curve;
• Identify examples of complementary goods;
• Recognize the uses for the point price elasticity concept;
• Identify how factors, such as technology, change the supply curve;
•  Recognize how demand estimates can be achieved with market experiments;
• Identify methods for predicting how buyers might respond to product changes;
• Recognize different terms used in quantitative demand analysis;
• Identify how some of the problems in estimating demand;
• Recognize attributes of a naive models of business forecasting;
• Identify how econometric forecasting methods are constructed;
• Recognize lagging and leading barometric forecasting economic indicators;
• Identify characteristics of input-output analysis;
• Define terms in the theory of production, such as the production function and average products;
• Recognize output and input relationships under the law of diminishing returns;
• Identify the purpose of an expansion path in illustrating relationships between capital and labor;
• Recognize the underlying assumption of linear programming (LP);
• Define the objective function;
• Identify implications of different slack variables;
• Recognize applications for linear programming;
• Define the isoprofit curve;
• Recognize the functions used in statistical cost analysis;
• Recognize how incremental (differential) costs vary with business decisions;
• Identify the costs most relevant to managerial decisions;
• Identify examples of the learning curve effect;
• Define a cost-volume-profit (cvp) analysis;
• Identify the conditions with perfectly competitive markets;
• Recognize attributes for firms in a monopolistic competitive industry;
• Define the concentration ratio used to determine monopolistic behavior;
• Recognize some of the popular pricing strategies;
• Determine optimal pricing based on price elasticity;
• Identify examples of peak load pricing;
• Recognize pricing policies used during initial product launches;
• Recognize when a company should approve a capital budgeting project;
• Define the cost of capital for a firm;
• Identify how to determine the post-audit review values;
• Define the concept of the expected value;
• Recognize factors and attributes involved in risk;
• Identify the purpose of the decision tree;
• Recognize implications of different antitrust policies, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act; and
• Identify departments within the federal government responsible for enforcing antitrust regulations and the powers they use to enforce the regulations.