Applied Microeconomics and Market Analysis Fundamentals Training Course

Course overview

Finance, commercial and policy teams routinely make decisions on pricing, supplier terms, capacity, market entry and investment cases using incomplete market evidence. The cost of weak analysis is tangible: prices that leave margin on the table, demand forecasts that ignore substitution effects, procurement decisions based on headline price alone, and business cases that mistake correlation for causation. This course equips participants to turn market data and economic assumptions into defensible recommendations.

Participants work through the core tools of applied microeconomics: supply and demand modelling, consumer choice, production and cost analysis, price elasticity, market structure, strategic interaction and welfare analysis. They learn to estimate and interpret demand relationships, calculate contribution and break-even implications, assess competitive responses, compare pricing options, and use regression evidence carefully in commercial decisions. Emphasis is placed on translating economic models into Excel-based analysis, charts and decision narratives that executives can scrutinise.

Delivery combines instructor-led explanation with worked calculations, market-data exercises and case discussions drawn from pricing, procurement and investment settings. Participants build a structured market analysis workbook, including demand assumptions, elasticity calculations, cost curves, competitive scenarios and a pricing recommendation. By the end of the week, each participant has a reusable analytical template and a short decision brief that can be adapted to a live business question.

The course is designed for professionals who already work with financial, commercial or operational data and need stronger economic reasoning behind their recommendations. It is particularly valuable where teams must explain not only what a model predicts, but why market participants are likely to respond as they do.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Construct supply-and-demand models to explain equilibrium price, quantity and market shocks
• Calculate and interpret own-price, cross-price and income elasticities from market data
• Build cost, revenue, contribution and break-even models for output and pricing decisions
• Assess market structure using concentration measures, entry barriers and competitive conduct indicators
• Apply consumer and producer surplus analysis to evaluate pricing, tax and regulatory changes
• Model strategic pricing responses using payoff matrices and basic game-theory concepts
• Estimate and interpret a demand regression in Excel or R while distinguishing correlation from causation
• Produce a market analysis workbook and evidence-based pricing recommendation for a business case

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Commercial Managers — who set prices, negotiate terms and need to quantify likely customer and competitor responses
• Financial Analysts — who prepare forecasts, investment cases and margin analyses using market assumptions
• Pricing Analysts — who test price changes, promotions and segmentation decisions against demand evidence
• Procurement Managers — who assess supplier markets, bargaining power and the economics of sourcing options
• Strategy and Business Development Analysts — who evaluate market entry, competitive positioning and growth opportunities
• Policy, Regulatory and Economic Analysts — who assess the distributional and market effects of interventions

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable reading business financial statements, working with percentages and ratios, and using Excel formulas, charts and basic tables. Familiarity with revenue, variable cost, fixed cost, margin and simple descriptive statistics is assumed. Participants should also be able to interpret a basic chart and rearrange straightforward algebraic expressions. Prior study of microeconomics, econometrics, R or Stata is not required; these are introduced in applied form. This is not a mathematics-heavy theory course, but attendees should expect to work with equations, datasets and quantitative case exercises throughout the week.

Training methodology

The week alternates between concise instructor-led modelling sessions and applied workshops using market, cost and customer datasets. Participants calculate elasticities, draw supply-and-demand shifts, build cost curves and test pricing scenarios in Excel before discussing the commercial implications in small groups. Cases examine issues such as a price increase in a concentrated market, supplier bargaining conditions and a proposed market intervention. The final day uses a capstone case to integrate demand, costs, competition and regression evidence into a management-ready recommendation and individual application plan.

Course outline

Day 1: Market foundations and demand analysis

• Economic scarcity, incentives and opportunity cost in business decisions
• Demand schedules, demand curves and determinants of demand
• Supply schedules, supply curves and determinants of supply
• Market equilibrium, comparative statics and shock analysis
• Own-price, cross-price and income elasticity calculations
• Consumer choice, substitution effects and willingness to pay
• Demand data visualisation and assumption testing in Microsoft Excel

Workshop: Participants analyse a market shock case and produce an Excel demand-and-supply chart with an elasticity-based explanation of the expected price and volume effects.

Day 2: Costs, production and pricing economics

• Production functions, productivity and diminishing marginal returns
• Fixed, variable, average and marginal cost curves
• Short-run versus long-run cost decisions
• Revenue, contribution margin and profit maximisation
• Break-even analysis and operating leverage
• Price discrimination, segmentation and versioning strategies
• Pricing scenario modelling with sensitivity tables in Microsoft Excel

Workshop: Participants build a pricing and contribution model for a multi-segment product portfolio and recommend a price structure under capacity constraints.

Day 3: Competition, market structure and strategy

• Perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition and oligopoly
• Market concentration using CR4 and Herfindahl-Hirschman Index measures
• Barriers to entry, switching costs and network effects
• Monopoly pricing, mark-ups and the Lerner index
• Oligopoly behaviour, strategic interdependence and reaction functions
• Payoff matrices, dominant strategies and Nash equilibrium
• Competitive intelligence inputs for market-structure assessment

Workshop: Participants complete a competitor-response workshop, calculating concentration measures and constructing a payoff matrix for a proposed price move.

Day 4: Applied econometrics for market evidence

• From business question to testable economic hypothesis
• Variable selection, measurement choices and data quality checks
• Descriptive statistics, scatterplots and correlation analysis
• Simple and multiple linear regression for demand estimation
• Coefficient interpretation, statistical significance and confidence intervals
• Omitted-variable bias, endogeneity and correlation-versus-causation risks
• Regression modelling and output interpretation in R and Stata

Workshop: Participants estimate a demand regression from a retail dataset and produce a one-page interpretation identifying usable findings and analytical limitations.

Day 5: Welfare, policy and integrated market decisions

• Consumer surplus, producer surplus and total welfare
• Deadweight loss from taxes, price controls and quotas
• Externalities, public goods and information asymmetry
• Cost-benefit reasoning for market and regulatory interventions
• Integrating demand, cost, competition and regression findings
• Writing an evidence-based executive market recommendation
• Model governance, assumption logs and sensitivity testing

Workshop: Participants complete a capstone market analysis, delivering a workbook and executive briefing that recommends a pricing, entry or intervention decision with stated risks.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Excel, R, Stata, Herfindahl-Hirschman Index

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions