Strategic Entry Deterrence and the Behavior of Pharmaceutical Incumbents Prior to Patent Expiration

This paper develops a new approach to testing for strategic entry deterrence and applies it to the behavior of pharmaceutical incumbents just before they lose patent protection. The approach involves looking at a cross-section of markets and examining whether behavior is nonmonotonic in the size of the market. Under certain conditions, investment levels will be monotone in market size if firms are not influenced by a desire to deter entry. Strategic investments, however, may be nonmonotone because entry deterrence is unnecessary in very small markets and impossible in very large ones, resulting in overall nonmonotonic investment. The pharmaceutical data contain advertising, product proliferation, and pricing information for a sample of drugs which lost patent protection between 1986 and 1992. Among the findings consistent with an entry deterrence motivation are that incumbents in markets of intermediate size have lower levels of advertising and are more likely to reduce advertising immediately prior to patent expiration.

Internet Retail Demand: Taxes, Geography, and Online-Offline Competition

Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from online retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online and online retail, and tax avoidance may be an important contributor to e-retail activity. Geography matters in two ways: we find some evidence that consumers prefer purchasing from firms in nearby states to benefit from faster shipping times as well as evidence of a separate preference for buying from in-state firms. Consumers appear fairly rational in some ways, but boundedly rational in others.

Search, Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet

We examine the competition between a group of Internet retailers that operate in an environment where a price search engine plays a dominant role. We show that for some products in this environment, the easy price search makes demand tremendously price-sensitive. Retailers, though, engage in obfuscation---practices that frustrate consumer search or make it less damaging to firms---resulting in much less price sensitivity on other products. We discuss several models of obfuscation and examine its effects on demand and markups empirically. Observed markups are adequate to allow efficient online retailers to survive.

Coordinating on Lower Prices: Pharmaceutical Pricing Under Political Pressure

This paper investigates possible effects of political activity on pharmaceutical prices, focusing on the health care reform period. We characterize firms based on their vulnerability to future price regulation and find that the more vulnerable firms were more likely to take various actions to forestall regulation, most notably coordinating on a specific percentage price increase during 1993. Since moderating price increases could have been an effective tool to avert regulation, the coordination we observe is the obvious response of the industry to a classic collective action problem.

Pharmaceutical Prices and Political Activity

Drug prices have been a conspicuous political issue in much of recent history, but no more so than during health care reform debates in 1993 and 1994. This paper investigates possible effects of political activity on pharmaceutical prices, with a particular focus on the health care reform period. It evaluates the extent to which pharmaceutical companies slowed the rates at which they increased prices in an attempt to preempt government intervention. To do so, we characterize companies based on their vulnerability to future price regulation. We then consider patterns in price movements across companies. The results suggest that companies whose drugs had longer patent lives and who had recently increased contributions to their corporate Political Action Committees (PACs) slowed price increases during 1992 and 1994 more than their competitors. It is difficult to distinguish pricing differences across companies in 1993, perhaps because most companies had pledged to keep price increases below the rate of inflation.