This class is about cartels and mergers and Professor Asker has done a lot of interesting research. Unless you are serious about working in this field, I wouldn't take this class. Although it is interesting, this class has a huge workload. He expects way too much from undergraduate students. All of his assignments are extremely vague and he expects you to figure it out on your own. The TA's are instructed to not give away any information so they are also very vague when you go to them for help. In addition, he is very strict on students not collaborating. The level of difficulty of these assignments is ridiculous and they should honestly be group projects if anything. I think the professor forgot what type of knowledge undergrads have and is treating us like Ph.D. students who have the ability to solve problems with no data given to really think outside of the box. He wants to challenge us and show us what it is like in the real world, but someone has to teach us how to do that first. It is ridiculous. Stay away unless you want to be challenged and stressed all quarter. I took this class because I thought it might be nice to have assignments instead of tests, but I'd much rather be in a normal econ elective.

The reviews below have it right, the workload in this class is quite a lot to put it mild. There are seven assignments a couple of which would've been finals in their own right in other economics classes. This is in addition to one final paper which has yet to be released as of writing this review. The professor purposely designs each essay/ps in a vague and fuzzy way so as to simulate real life economic consulting problems. Therefore, there are many ways to answer each assignment. Thus, you will be spending a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how to approach each question. That said at the end of this class I do consider myself a quasi-expert in analyzing the competitive effects of mergers and acquisitions. If you are interested in economic consulting and working with anti-trust cases this is the class for you. Otherwise, you may lose motivation and engagement with the material very early in the class.

Edit: Ended up with an A in the class.

This class is TERRIBLE. I mean awful. Each week alternates a problem set or an essay. He makes math errors on his pre-recorded lectures and his problem set/essays are NOTHING like what he teaches. All you have to work from is his one example problem that is way way WAY simpler than anything he gives you. He explains concepts at a high level but doesn’t really show how to do it a lot of the time. I got an A in this class but I had to spend easily triple the time on this class as I did Econometrics. Seriously towards the end each week was well over 15 hours of work. Since the class was doing better than he expected what does he do? Make it harder. Apparently 10 people getting 90% or over is too many???
I don't know about prior quarters. I took this class based on the reviews. But stay THE HELL away from this class now. He sends out instructions out with clarifications about what he actually wants for each essay because it is so unclear. He sent out 6 FAQs for the final and I had to rewrite it over and over as more clarifications came out. Normally you only get these like two days before the essay is due (and the essays are long). I literally had two write two essays simultaneously because I wasn't sure what he wanted so I was updating them both until I got clarification. Seriously. I don't know if it is his fault or our godawful Econ department because of their ridiculous curve (which he takes VERY seriously). So yeah stay away if you’re looking for something manageable.

Let me just say that I really do think Prof. Asker is a good professor and really cares about the material. He is clearly very knowledgeable about the subject matter, and he genuinely seems like a nice guy. With that being said, this class is not designed to be taught remotely. I understand that courses have to adjust to accommodate the unprecedented situation we are all in, but his methods of evaluation for this course were insane this quarter. As the previous reviews have said, your grade is based on 4 problem sets, 3 Essays, and 1 Final Exam Essay. There is a PS or Essay assigned EVERY WEEK, and each assignment takes upwards of 8 hours to complete. The essays are extremely vague, so you have to make a lot of assumptions. The PS are a lot more difficult than the examples he goes over in class. There is absolutely no collaboration with classmates allowed. Im sure this class would have been a lot more manageable if it were taught on campus and we had actual exams. If you were thinking of taking this course, I would recommend waiting until instruction on campus resumes. Not a fun class to take at home.

This is my last econ class before graduating, and I kinda feel bad for those who take this as their first elective.
On the good side, you really get to know how to apply econ models in real-life situations (hope so).
While on the other side, I wrote 2300 words for the last essay assignment (only worth 10% unfortunately), and there are 7 weekly assignments in total, and this is an econ class not writing 2 or something.
Good luck

This class was a disaster. The professor was the most unapproachable and ambiguous I've ever had. All lectures were pre-recorded and uploaded to youtube, because of this there is no way to participate or ask any questions if you are confused. I feel like the professor just wanted to get all of his "teaching" out of the way and focus on his research, which he shamelessly plugs in many of his lectures.

Assignments in this class are insane. Each one is basically a test and there is one every week. The difficulty of the assignments was so tough that the TAs admitted that it would be impossible for undergrad students to complete them to the specifications the professor wanted. If you have any problems in this class you cannot ask the professor as he has a 10% participation grade he will give out based on how much you bother him. He tells you to think long and hard before asking any question, basically don't ask a stupid question. When doing the assignments there is literally no guide as to what you should discuss or calculate as the grading scheme is only published AFTER your grades are out.

Overall the class and professor were terrible. DON'T TAKE THIS COURSE!!!

I've never written a review, but strongly felt that I needed to in order to give a fair picture of this class.

I took this class online. First off, this class is DIFFICULT and requires HARD WORK (think 8h a week at least). That being said, it has also been extremely intellectually stimulating and taught me USEFUL econ, statistical and writing skills that will come in extremely handy if you wish to do anything related to econ, law or policy in the future. (I'm interning at a data consulting firm rn and well... the skills are honestly very similar. Real world data sucks!)
Take this if you're strongly interested in antitrust policy, economic research/ careers, or if you're motivated by intellectual challenges. Prof Asker is a huge expert in all these things, but he is NOT a lenient professor who's just going to hand out easy As. DO NOT take this if you're looking for an easy Econ elective.

Grading:
70% based on 3 essays and 4 problem sets (the lowest is dropped)
10% participation (basically don't piss him off)
20% final (extended essay)
Given the online format, he seems to have made the assignments particularly difficult to reduce the chances of cheating. If you'd like to do well in this class, make sure you have a knack for critical thinking, application of economic concepts and real world data, and strong writing skills. He expects you to be able to apply concepts from simple examples to more challenging cases, to use real world data, (For example, I think I had an advantage for writing because I've interned with multiple policy departments in the government and this came in VERY helpful for me).

Teaching: He is indeed one of those professors who research better than they teach, but I've had far worse professors in the Econ department so I'd consider him average. I did not like his prerecorded lectures because I felt there was a lack of structure. He uses slides only ~10% of the time, and all the rest of the time is just spent doing "chalk and talk" aka writing on an iPad and sharing screen. He also tends to gloss over simpler concepts like how to write an essay and algebraic methods to solve psets because he assumes you know them, which I would have appreciated given how much his grading depends on them. My TA was also extremely vague in their response because they can't divulge the answer, and so discussions became office hours LOL.

Would I still take this class again? Probably yes, because of how much I've learnt and because I like real-world applications best, but I wish someone had told me all of this BEFORE I enrolled so I knew what to expect :)

This is the hardest economic class I've taken so far. Homework assignments are extremely hard and requires tremendous amount of efforts. Especially the essays are much harder than the course materials we learned in class. If you ask Professor or TAs for help, they would give minimum hints that are hardly informative. They expect you to figure out the vague description of the essay and work out the solutions on your own. Overall, unless you are really seriously considering a career in industrial organization research or related jobs, and fully prepared for spending at least 20 hours every week on assignments, do not take the class.

I took this class after seeing good reviews from previous batches, but this class was exceptionally bad. Let me start off by saying that this has been the most interesting econ class I've taken at UCLA, and the most applicable to real life situations unlike the other classes which are purely theoretical and useless in real life, but the homework was way too hard. Asker expects way too much of us by giving extremely vague questions on the homework, thus expecting us to make our own assumptions and reason it out without any guidance. The homework assignments were practically impossible given his lectures, and became progressively harder every week. I would spend the entire weekend on his homework and still barely pass each assignment. With assignments every week, I felt burnt out by this class, since a new one would be given immediately after I completed the previous one. Even the TA agreed that the work was too difficult given our abilities, so that's saying a lot about how hard it was. I feel like I wasted my entire quarter on this class and put in way too much effort for the grades I've been getting.

This class is mainly about mergers and anticompetition. Professor Asker is definitely experienced in this topic, but I wouldn't recommend taking his class!!! EXTREME amount of HARD work. We had to finish 3 essays, 4 problem sets, and one final essay throughout the quarter. The thing is his essay questions are so unnecessarily vague, and he wasn't willing to make our lives easier by providing some useful hints. I struggled with every single essay, and his grading was strict too. Spending over 8 hours on one essay and only getting a B was not rewarding to me. Also, he cares too much about limiting the amount of As students can get. He intentionally made each assignment harder and harder just so he could divide students into different grade levels. You can definitely learn stuff from this class, but be prepared to be super independent in learning and spend most of your time on this class.