Good afternoon and welcome to the course Industrial Organization: Strategy and Competition in Business. Today, we will talk about The Firm. It will be the first entire lecture, but before we start talking about the specifics of The Firms, let me give you a brief tour of the course. First of all, let me tell you a few things about me. My name is Kosmas Marinakis. I am from Greece. I'm an Assistant Professor of Economics at Higher School of Economics in Russia. We're here in Moscow. I have a Ph.D. in Economics from the North Carolina State University in the U.S. I got it in 2008. I have 14 years of total teaching experience in Economics. I have taught this specific course, Industrial Organization, for five years. And I've also taught other courses, like for example, Microeconomics, Advanced Microeconomics for Ph.D. Students, Macroeconomics, Statistics for Business, Professionalism, and also, I'm teaching a course on public speaking. I have my personal website in which you can find a lot of information about me. There will be a link in the website of Coursera for that. It's www.kmarinakis.org where you can find anything you need about me, my research, and everything you need to know. There's teaching assistance for this course. We have an excellent assistant. His name is Alexey Ostapchuk. He's a Master's in Financial Economics from University of Oxford, and he will be creating all the tasks and all the problems that you will have to solve for getting a degree in this course, or getting a diploma. The course now. Industrial Organization from the perspective of Strategy and Competition in Business. This is one of the most interesting fields in economics. We will have to study how firms are organized, how they interact, how they fight wars, how they play games together, how they tried to protect their profits, how to protect the areas. The topics are fascinating. They're modern. They're up to date. They commonly make headlines in the newspapers and on the news, and they are very useful in your career, no matter what area of business you're dealing with. There will be many real world examples and lots of study cases because what we are trying to do is we are trying to take the economic theory and connect it to the real world, how economic theory and how our models can be useful to you in your real life. The course will be fun. I promise that. But it will not be easy. It needs concentration. It's a deep course. It needs you to have pen and paper to keep notes, to solve some of the things that will be on the slides. It needs a lot of practice. But as almost everything difficult, in the end, it will pay off. About the lectures. Most lectures will have three components. First of all, we'll be talking about some theory. We're laying out some models, some principles, some notions that we need to know. And then, once we do that, we will try to see what is behind the model. What is the economics behind the analysis? What the theory can teach us, and what we can take away and use it in our real lives? And talking about real life, we're going to have an empirical part in which we are going to talk about real cases and real examples. I will almost have an example for everything I will try to teach you. Every difficult notion, I will try to make up an example and to give you to understand how this notion works in the real world, and why it is important for you to know it. We are lucky to have a textbook. I will refer to the textbooks several times during the lecture. The title of the textbook is Industrial Organization: A Strategic Approach. It's a version of 2000 by two excellent professors of Industrial Organization: Jeffrey Church and Roger Ware. The good news is that you can download this website, the e-book, legally and free, at this link that will be also together with the links of the course. And professors Church and Ware, they were kind enough to make this book free and available for everybody, and we can use it as a very valuable resource in our courses. It's August 2017. We are filming in beautiful Moscow. In the next segment, we're going to get started.