Strategic Economic Analysis for Business Decision-Makers

This module takes you into the fundamental factors driving economic decisions, emphasizing the primacy of price. Additionally, we'll examine the intricate dynamics of networks and supply chains, providing you with essential insights to excel in this field.

Here, we will dissect the critical components of economic modeling within distributed supply chains and networks. This module will take you through a comprehensive exploration of various economic scenarios, from the simplest one-to-one supply and demand relationships to complex dynamics involving competing supplies, demands, and multiple sources and uses, as well as a look into the potential pitfalls of aggregation in economic modeling.

In this module, we'll focus on "What If?" analysis, exploring comparative statics. For example, ponder the dynamics of a market with six competing supplies vying to serve a single market. We teach you to think about who or what sets the price? Who provides a positive amount to the market? Who provides zero to the market. Who is the marginal source of supply, and what does that even mean? What if a lower cost competitor enters? What if a higher cost competitor enters? What if a regulator subsidizes one or more of the competing suppliers? This gives you the skills necessary for effective economic modeling in complex supply chain environments.

This module dives into microeconomic models of agents, encompassing a diverse range of components such as depletable resources, processing variations, transportation, storage, and consumer behaviors, including multi-attribute considerations. Furthermore, we will examine the nuances of environmental economics, including emissions taxes, cap and trade systems, mandates, and emission accounting.

This module critically evaluates and compares our approach, namely fundamental, textbook economics, to alternative methods, including linear optimization, nonlinear optimization, complementarity analysis, statistical extrapolation of historical data, and systems dynamics. By the end of this course, you'll gain a clear understanding of why our approach stands out as an effective tool for addressing the complexities of economic modeling in distributed supply chains and networks.

Alongside our established modules, we’ll touch on adjacent topics that are often pivotal in real-world scenarios. We will explore endogenous capacity builds, mastering the art of demand curve estimation through Bayesian regression, and developing effective solution methods.