Managerial Economics Major A major in managerial economics develops students' capacity to analyze the economic environment in which an organization operates, to understand the constraints this environment places on the organization's pursuit of its goals, to predict how these constraints may change with time, and to apply economic reasoning to an organization's internal decision making.
All courses have a managerial emphasis that traditional economics courses lack.
Typical problems covered within the managerial economics curriculum are pricing within an oligopolistic industry, forecasting product demand over the business cycle, predicting and evaluating the effects that government regulatory intervention will have on an industry, and setting optimal transfer prices among divisions within a corporation. A major in managerial economics is appropriate for students whose career plan is to begin within a specific functional area such as finance, marketing, accounting, or operations management and then move into top-level general management. Initially the managerial economics background will provide students with a deeper understanding of the functional area, since economics is a basic discipline from which each of the functional areas has derived some of its principles and ideas. Later, the economics background will enable students to adapt to current thinking and to make the transition from the tactical decision making of middle management to the strategic decision making of top management. In addition, a good grounding in economics is almost essential for those students majoring in health, public, or other nonprofit management because policy questions within these areas are increasingly being argued and resolved within the conceptual framework of economics.