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The high scientific quality and the exceptional strength of the EDP training are due to several aspects.

First it offers a basic and extremely rigorous training in the main disciplines in economics at an advanced level, oriented towards doctoral research: micro-economics, macro-economics and econometrics.

Second it offers the possibility to acquire specialized knowledge in various quantitative methods and techniques, taught by leading experts, such as game theory, social choice theory, econometrics methodology and statistics, quantitative finance and economic dynamics.

Third it allows the students to choose among many fields of application in economics, oriented towards imperfect competition analysis, industry and public sector regulation, information technologies, labor market and macro-economic policy, development or environmental issues. This third aspect is meant to ensure the applied relevance of the program and the possibility for some of the students to use their formal skills in policy-oriented dissertation topics. In the past, this training organization has been very successful, and the EDP graduates have obtained good positions in top European universities, in the industrial and public sector, as well as in international institutions and the European Commission. The choice of topics is greatly enlarged thanks to the existing EDP network.

Training in the most recent advances in these various methods and fields will be ensured not only by regular courses, but also by doctoral level seminars, workshops and mini-courses. The main research approach promoted in this proposal is the development of quantitative methods and techniques for economics. Almost naturally, this creates a link between the project and some disciplines outside the social sciences, such as applied mathematics and operations research (via game theory and mathematical economics), statistics (via econometrics), logic and computer science (via decision and game theory and information economics). But this is only one interdisciplinary aspect of the EDP. The application of quantitative methods is also linked to problems examined in other social sciences. A (non-exhaustive) list of these other disciplines includes: political science (via public and regional economics), ethics (via social choice), sociology (via labor and health economics), geography (via spatial economics), psychology (via experimental economics), law (via competition policy).