Leon Musolff is an assistant professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He specializes in empirical industrial organization. His research concentrates on the empirical analysis of e-commerce platforms using tools from structural industrial organization and causal inference techniques from applied microeconomics. He studies how online platforms can design their marketplaces to shape algorithmic competition between merchants, allow for the detection of collusive bidding rings, and tradeoff entry incentives against the need to surface competitively priced products in search and recommendation algorithms. More recent (and early-stage) work explores the impact of generative artificial intelligence and the markets for cloud computing and search engines.
Before joining Wharton, Professor Musolff did his graduate work at Princeton University and completed a postdoc in the Economics & Computation group at Microsoft Research New England.
This course will cover the economic foundations of business strategy and decision-making in market environments with other strategic actors and less than full information, as well as advanced pricing strategies. Topics include oligopoly models of market competition, creation, and protection, sophisticated pricing strategies for consumers with different valuations or consumers who buy multiple units (e.g. price discrimination, bundling, two-part tariffs), strategies for managing risk and making decisions under uncertainty, asymmetric information and its consequences for markets, and finally moral hazard and principle-agent theory with application to incentive contacts.