Economics for Business Decisions

You've made pricing decisions by looking at competitors. You've built capacity based on growth forecasts. You've negotiated deals that felt like wins at the time but soured later. And somewhere along the way, you've wondered: is there a systematic way to think about this? There is. It's not magic, but it works. Economics is a lens for understanding why markets move the way they do — supply meets demand, incentives shape behavior, and competitive structures determine who has power and who doesn't. With it, you can diagnose why a price increase succeeded or failed, predict how competitors will respond to your moves, and see the hidden incentive effects lurking in your organization. This course teaches the economic reasoning that works in real business, not abstract theory. You'll learn to read market structure the way a chess player reads the board: identify whether you're in perfect competition (price matters most), monopolistic competition (differentiation matters), oligopoly (rivals watch each other), or monopoly (you set the rules). You'll use elasticity to forecast whether a price move is profitable or ruinous. You'll spot principal-agent problems before they blow up your culture. You'll interpret macroeconomic data — interest rates, inflation, GDP growth — not to predict the future (you can't), but to run scenarios and stress-test your plans. And you'll learn the limits. Markets fail. Incentives can pull people in destructive directions. Cognitive biases lead to predictable mistakes. Competition sometimes works against you. Ethics matters. The course doesn't pretend economics answers every question. By the end, you'll think differently. Not every decision becomes obvious — business is inherently uncertain — but you'll know which questions to ask, what data to find, and how to reason through it honestly. You'll communicate with consultants and colleagues in their language. And when someone makes a claim about the market or your strategy, you'll have a framework to evaluate it. This is practical economic literacy: seeing the invisible forces that shape decisions, and using that clarity to decide better.