Course Overview

This course is concerned with the economic way of thinking, the economics of effective management, the economic foundation of business strategy, and the economic environment of business. It draws on and integrates microeconomic and macroeconomic disciplines to bring new insights into business strategy and effective management.

Managerial economics is one of the important fundamental courses of the OMBA program. All fields under the business program need to use information based on economics. The topics that we will cover in this course will be relevant to management, marketing, finance, and accounting. For example,

• identifying production and pricing strategies in different market structures is important for successful management;
• understanding tax policies and cost structures of firms can be essential for accountants;
• analyzing consumers and the market’s features will be significant for accurate marketing decisions;
• the time value of money is a basic concept in finance; and
• market structures and production strategies are important for decisions on supply chain management.

Economics uses mathematical modeling as a tool to understand the complex nature of consumption and production behaviors. In this course, we will use simple mathematical models. Because this is an introduction-level course, these economic models will be simple, and they will be assigned to illustrate the different market structures and consumption and production decisions. If you have a solid grounding in basic algebra, basic calculus, and quantitative relationships, you should have no trouble with the quantitative content of the course. In this course, you also need to understand and interpret graphs, make calculations from tables or figures, and solve simple equations to keep up with the class material.

Remember that you need to work hard to learn how to do economic analysis and that memorization alone will not get you through the course. In this course, you will learn to think like an economist, so you're encouraged to work on lots of problems. In the textbook, many small cases are discussed. It's strongly suggested that you read these applications to better understand the concepts. If you want to practice, there are many exercise questions to study in this course. The solutions to the selected questions from the textbook will be given in each lesson. It will be important for you to go over these questions and their solutions. Try to solve the assigned questions alone, and then compare your answers with the correct answers. The textbook is accompanied by an excellent study guidebook with many questions and their answers. This study guidebook can be helpful while you're getting prepared for the quizzes and other exams.