Economics and E-Commerce
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this economics course on the business models behind internet companies. It opens with core industrial organization concepts, monopoly pricing, price discrimination, product differentiation, and barriers to entry, before turning to case-based discussions of specific online businesses. Students apply the IO framework to examine how firms like search engines, auction sites, and platform marketplaces set prices, compete, and build market power online. Materials include lecture notes, readings drawn from theoretical models and empirical studies, and assignments that extend the IO concepts to real internet businesses. The course is aimed at students with some grounding in microeconomics who want to see how classical pricing and competition theory plays out in digital markets. As with other MIT OCW offerings, materials are free to access under a Creative Commons license, with no certificate offered.