Industrial Organization

Industrial Organization is where microeconomics stops assuming perfect competition and starts asking how firms actually behave when they have market power — how they price, deter entry, merge, collude, or get regulated when they don't. You'll lean heavily on game theory to model oligopoly interactions and work through homeworks and a midterm/final built around equilibrium analysis, with the second half pivoting to the logic behind antitrust and the regulation of private monopolies. It sits downstream of intermediate micro and game theory, and it's the course that finally lets you reason rigorously about real markets — why airlines price the way they do, why mergers get blocked, why utilities are regulated the way they are.