UCLA Professor Michael Rubens has won the Warren C. Scoville Distinguished Teaching Award for Spring 2024 for his course ECON 106P: Pricing and Strategy. ECON 106P is an upper-advanced elective course in the Business Economics program. It teaches students how to make strategic pricing decisions based on data analysis. The main learning objective is the ability to analyze data sets in order to answer concrete business questions, such as “How should airline companies set prices on different routes?”, and “How should a large fashion company allocate its advertising budget across different marketing channels?”.

The course first develops a toolbox of empirical methods to estimate cost and demand functions. It then applies these methods to study advanced pricing topics such as horizontal merger analysis, price discrimination, and dynamic pricing. Students learn to code in R using real-world datasets, and apply these skills to present a business case in a `Economists in Action’ conference, in which they are evaluated by a professional jury.

Professor Rubens’ profile can be found here.