Maastricht University - School of Business and Economics

The course introduces the objectives and implementations of Competition Policy such as antitrust institutions, its member states, and the US. Participants learn how to evaluate the goals and their legal implementation from an economic point of view. Such an (empirical and theoretical) economic analysis enables participants to criticize existing Competition Law and to suggest improvements. These findings are applied to landmark antitrust cases and ongoing controversies among competition policy scholars. The course starts with an overview of international antitrust institutions, thereby covering the major systems of competition policy in the EU and the US, as well as suggested or recently implemented frameworks in developing countries and transition economies. The course then continues with a theoretical and empirical identification of market power – a necessary condition for any anticompetitive practice. The following sessions provide an economic analysis of the major fields of competition policy such as the fight against collusion, merger regulation, and the abuse of a dominant position. For each field, students apply modern theories of strategic firm behavior to explain when and why firms indeed act in an anticompetitive way. These insights are then utilized to develop guidelines for antitrust authorities. Finally, these recommendations are taken as a benchmark for an evaluation of existing antitrust policy schemes. The course makes excessive use of case studies to illustrate and test the policy recommendations. Prerequisite for this course is knowledge and understanding of microeconomics. Exchange students need to major in economics.

The long-run development and international economic relations of developing countries are chosen as the major topic of this course. The long-run growth section deals with structural change from agriculture to industry and services, institutions, distribution, population, education, health, taxation and government expenditure, agriculture, and other resources. The international relations section relates growth to migration, aid, international trade, and foreign debt, the latter including financial crises.

Given the continuously growing impact of the European Union on business, attention to politics is warranted in international business studies. At the same time, governance in the EU is far from straightforward, as it is based on a very complex mixture of political principles, structures, and institutions. This course looks at the wider institutional environment of the firm and provides background for doing business in Europe.  This course is a good option for students aspiring to work for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or business practitioners in Europe. A creative, multidisciplinary approach is taken, using original and challenging literature from the literature on international business, comparative politics, and comparative economic systems. The course material assists in understanding past and current changes in the broader European business & politics landscape.

In many situations, economic actors need to make decisions while knowing that the final outcome also depends on the decisions of others. Such situations are called games, and the actors involved are called players. In order to reach a good decision, it is important for a player to reason about the decisions and motivations of their opponents. This course teaches how to reason about your opponents in game theoretic situations, and how to use this reasoning to make good decisions. The theory is applied to various economic situations of interest.

This course examines historical evolution in terms of human and organizational actors responding to opportunities in their environment in ways that pioneered entirely new industries and forms of business. This course studies a path-breaking historical development in one or more leading industrial capitalist nations during the second industrial revolution. The course zooms in on business activities and their outcomes, and zooms out to the historical and national context in which these events have taken place. Looking back at history can be concretely informative since much what exists now has its roots in the past. But studying history is also a way of developing creative notions about how humans interact with their business environment in a situation of pervasive uncertainty. This can broaden our mental scope in dealing with our own uncertain world.