Two students comprised a team honored for superior work in ECO 4400: Economic Consulting.
Two students were honored this fall by the Department of Economics with its “Best Capstone in Economic Consulting” award.
Quinn Faller ‘26 and Jessica Wenner ‘25 completed the winning competitive presentation for ECO 4400: Economic Consulting.
Economic Consulting helps students further develop their data visualization skills, and it provides practical applications for the techniques learned in statistics to analyze client data. Teams create professional business memos and advise a client with a final presentation that summarizes findings with visual displays and analytics.
This year’s project was Estimating Demand Elasticities for Industrial Products. Students were asked to:
- Estimate demand elasticities for two products offered by a hypothetical industrial manufacturing company.
- Recommend pricing strategies and marketing campaigns to boost sales and profitability.
- Compete in short presentations where their peers and instructor judged recommendations.
Since consulting firms often like to invite interns and early career staff to observe internal presentations to provide opportunities for critical thinking and ask questions we included six peer judges from ECO 1000 courses: Madeline Dolan ’28, Ainsley Lane ’28, Omar Khamis ’28, Samantha Midlam ’28, Hope Rosen ’28 and Marin Sikes ’28.
“In internal projects like these, early career economists get to explore how price and sales data can inform pricing and marketing strategies,” said Associate Professor Brooks Depro, who teaches the course. “During this year’s presentation, the team demonstrated their understanding of the price elasticity of demand, included clear visuals for a non-expert audience, and offered a compelling story that correctly used economic theory when companies have market power”