PhD in Economics - Industrial Organization in Madison United States | University of Wisconsin-Madison

The standard graduate preparation in industrial organization consists of two courses. One course presents an overview of the field, focusing on topics where theoretical models have successfully been taken to data. These topics include: static oligopoly models of pricequantity competition in homogeneous and differentiated good markets, models of product search and advertising, bilateral oligopoly models with contracting, models of contracting with asymmetric information, auctions, models of price discrimination, static and dynamic models of entry and exit. The second course focuses more on the details of how to estimate these models and, in particular, on the treatment of unobservables. The course also covers recent developments in the field. The main goal of this course is to transition students from being consumers of research to producers of research in industrial organization.

The empirical approach of industrial organization has shifted from discovering robust empirical regularities that hold across a broad cross section of industries to the detailed study of individual markets based on the theoretical model. This reflects the belief that market structure and firm behavior are sufficiently diverse across industries that they are best studied in the context of a well-defined product and geographical market. The methodology for studying markets at this level involve specifying an equilibrium model of firm behavior and applying this model to data by testing its predictions (reduced form) andor by estimating its primitives (structural), which are typically consumer preferences and firm costs. Knowledge of model primitives is used to construct counterfactuals and conduct policy analysis. The main analytical tools are game theory, econometrics, and computational methods, and students would benefit from taking advanced courses in these subjects.