ERM511: Principles of Economics for Risk Management

This Thematic Unit / Module is designed to introduce students to the foundation topics in microeconomics and industrial organization. This knowledge is important for reaching decisions in everyday business. The decisions aim to maximize profit and to strategically design and prepare a future for the business that will guarantee the existence and hopefully enlargement of profit in the long run. In fact this module will prepare students to forecast the framework of their business for the next day and thus hedge against business risks. In essence the module aims to prepare students as leaders who build business tactics and they will become a lot more than middle managers who rarely blaze trails in unknown areas and uncertain times such as those that businesses are encountered with nowadays.

Overall the module provides principles to foster the goals of the organization, as well as a better understanding of the external business environment in which an organization operates. In this module, future managers will learn how to increase company’s profitability by applying economic analysis to a wide array of business problems. The course will develop students’ capacity to analyze the economic environments in which business entities operate and understand how managerial decisions can vary under different constraints that each economic environment places on a manager’s pursuit of his/her goals. Its focus will be on analyzing the functioning of markets, the economic behavior of firms and other economic agents under various market structures, and the economic and social implications of the outcomes.