Code: S3C2
ECTS: 6
Semester: 3rd
This course provides a rigorous analysis of information economics and its applications to digital markets, exploring how information asymmetries, network effects, and strategic interactions shape the behavior of consumers and firms in the digital economy. We will delve into the unique characteristics of digital markets, examining their implications for market structure, competition, and innovation.
Key concepts and topics covered include:
- Fundamentals of Information Economics: Review core concepts of information economics, including adverse selection, moral hazard, signaling, screening, and the role of information in economic decision-making.
- Economics of Digital Goods and Services: Analyze the unique properties of digital goods, such as zero marginal cost, network effects, and the role of intellectual property rights.
- Platform Economics: Explore the economics of multi-sided platforms, including network effects, pricing strategies, economic models and platform competition, and the role of data in platform ecosystems.
- Search and Information Intermediaries: Analyze the role of search engines and other information intermediaries in digital markets, examining their impact on consumer choice, market efficiency, and competition.
- Online Advertising and Pricing Strategies: Investigate the economics of online advertising, including targeted advertising, auction mechanisms, and the implications for consumer privacy and market power.
- Competition Policy in Digital Markets: Discuss the challenges of applying traditional antitrust frameworks to digital markets, considering issues such as market definition, dominance, and the role of data in competition in view with the open source economic models
- Innovation and the Digital Economy: Examine the impact of digital technologies on innovation, exploring topics such as open source software, intellectual property, and the dynamics of technological change.
Foundations of information economics and their relevance to digitally mediated markets; information asymmetry, adverse selection, moral hazard, signalling, and screening; characteristics of digital goods and services, including low marginal cost, scalability, and reproducibility; platforms and multisided markets; network effects, data-driven advantage, and competitive dynamics in digital ecosystems; economics of search engines, recommender systems, and information intermediaries; online advertising, pricing strategies, personalisation, and the role of user data; issues of dominance, innovation, regulation, and competition policy in digital markets; open-source and alternative models of value creation; critical analysis of economic structures and governance challenges in the contemporary digital economy.
- Search, analysis and synthesis of data and information, with the use of the necessary technology
- Adaptability to new situations
- Decision-making
- Working independently
- Working in an interdisciplinary environment
- Production of new research ideas
- Criticism and self-criticism
- Production of free, creative and inductive thinking
Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:
Knowledge
- explain core concepts of information economics and their relevance to the digital economy;
- describe the economic characteristics of digital goods, services, platforms, and data-driven markets;
- discuss the roles of asymmetry, signalling, screening, network effects, and strategic interaction in digital markets.
Skills
- analyse digital market structures using economic reasoning and appropriate conceptual models;
- examine the behaviour of platforms, search intermediaries, advertisers, and users in data-intensive environments;
- evaluate issues of competition, innovation, pricing, and regulation in contemporary digital markets.
Competences
- critically interpret digital economic phenomena in a theoretically grounded manner;
- connect economic theory with current market practices and policy debates;
- formulate informed positions on the governance and future development of digital markets.
