Drugs

Competition Problems in Prescription Drug Market

Although not the sole cause of high prescription drug costs, abusive practices that distort competition contribute to the problem. Too many companies...

Preventing Drug Shortages and Saving Lives: The Role of Quality and Reliability Standards

Prescription drug shortages have become more common in recent years, interrupting usual medical care and increasing patient risk and system costs, but...

What Is the Price of a Prescription Drug?

Due to lack of transparency and mystery rebates, which are considered trade secrets, figuring out the price of a prescription drug is...

Paid to Show the Drug Works: Why “Blind” Clinical Trials for New Drugs are Far Less Blind Than They Should Be

New research shows that physicians in industry-sponsored trials are more captured by pharmaceutical companies than physicians in unsponsored ones.

The Real Price of Health Data: Americans Don’t Want to Share Their Records for Free

The 2019 Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index survey shows that 93 percent of participants don’t want to share their health data with digital...

The Rise of the Opioids: How Purdue Invented New Markets for OxyContin

Purdue's strategy was to market its opioids directly to patients via brochures, videos, advertisements, and the internet. It also provided information to doctors and...

The Generic Pharmaceutical Market Needs Competition. Non-Profits Can Provide It

JustMedicine is a non-profit that aims to introduce competition into the generic drug market by sponsoring generic entrants. The organization’s CEO explains why non-profit...

Perverse Market Incentives Encourage High Prescription Drug Prices

Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are the under-discussed market participants who manage prescription drug insurance for the vast majority of Americans. PBMs claim to be a lone...

"The Pharmaceutical Industry Has a Large Amount of Control Over the Field of Oncology"

In the second part of our two-part interview with Daniel Goldstein, MD, an oncologist who studies the influence of business interests on healthcare, we talk...

When Medical Experiments Serve the Business Needs of Pharmaceutical Firms Instead of Science

The first part of a two-part interview with Daniel Goldstein, MD, an oncologist who also studies the influence of business interests on healthcare—from treating patients...

LATEST NEWS

Merged Firms Offer Less Product Variety

In new research, Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Christopher Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu find that mergers and acquisitions often lead to the merged firm offering less product variety than when the two firms operated pre-merger.

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.