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Global MBA
Business Economics, an online MBA course taught by Associate Professor Masaoki Tamura, is now available. In this course, students will learn about people's behavior towards economic indicators such as price.
MBA "Business Economics" by Associate Professor Masaoki Tamura has started. In this class, we will discuss various cases involving price. In this course, students will learn how to make effective use of price, a concept they may not understand, and one that often has surprising effects.
This "Business Economics" course is about behavioral economics, that is, how people behave when "price", an indicator of the economy, moves.
There are various forms of pricing, including fixed fees and price discrimination, which changes the price offered by different people for the same goods and services. When do these work and how can they be used? Also, when price hikes are sometimes violently opposed by consumers and business partners, when do they lead to opposition and how can they be avoided? Also, what measures should be taken to deal with those "prices" strategically? We will learn about the behavior and psychology of consumers, which is called "mental accounting," and aim to understand and implement these concepts in the field of pricing. On the third day of the class, we used a case study of Priceline.com, an online travel agency, to examine discount rates for travel-related purchases such as airline tickets and hotel stays. Students discussed the advantages and disadvantages from both the consumer and corporate sides, and deepened their understanding so that they could apply it to motivating people in the business world.
Profile of Associate Professor Masaoki Tamura
Dr. Tamura graduated from Kyoto University with a B.A. in Economics, and went on to complete an M.A. in Economics at the University of Tokyo and an MSc Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. D. in economics from the University of Tokyo. He worked as a special assistant at the Center for Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University, and as a special assistant professor at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University before assuming his current position in April 2017. Currently, he is also a visiting researcher at the Capital Investment Research Institute, Development Bank of Japan.