Schedule

Schedule for the previous edition of this course. Instructors, topics, and schedule are subject to change.

Contents and course description

1. Competition, innovation and affordability:

• Life-cycle of pharmaceuticals
• Patents as reward to innovation
• Competition as incentive to innovate
• Generic competition and affordability
• Rewarding innovation and granting access: a dynamic challenge

Case study: EC Pharmaceutical Sector Inquiry

2. Pricing and trade in the internal market:

• Regulation and negotiation of pharmaceutical prices
• The challenge of pricing innovation
• Cross-country price differentials
• Parallel trade and international reference pricing

Case studies: Refusal to supply and dual pricing cases

3. Exploitative abuse: excessive pricing in pharma

• Introduction to Article 102
• General background: When to use excessive pricing actions in antitrust?
• What are the possible tests of excessive prices?

Case studies: Pharma excessive pricing cases

4. Exclusionary abuses in pharma

• Theories of harm: predation, rebates, margin squeeze
• “Raising rivals’ costs” and other abusive conducts 

Case study: Exclusionary abuse cases in pharma

5. Horizontal agreements: patent settlements with reverse payments

• Introduction to Article 101
• The intersection between patent law and competition law
• The economic assessment of pay for delay
• Challenges for actual enforcement

Case studies: Pay-for-delay cases

6. Special lecture Value, cost and adoption of healthcare innovation

• The challenge of measuring the relative added value of new health technologies 
• The shortcomings of cost-effectiveness analysis as conducted so far
• Scope for improvement by incorporating broader sets of benefits and costs in a longer term perspective
• Incorporating this assessment of relative effectiveness and costs into pricing and reimbursement decisions, especially for on-patent drugs
• What can be its impact on pharmaceutical firms' decisions about how much to invest in R&D and in what therapeutic areas
• What is the scope for and the role of competition in pharmaceutical markets, especially for on-patent drugs

Special lecturer, Guillem López-Casasnovas (CRES, UPF and BSE) 
Professor López-Casasnovas (PhD, University of York) is the founder and first director of the UPF Center for Research on Health Economics (CRES).

7. Merger control

• Introduction to merger control
• Horizontal effects in marketed products, pipeline and innovation
• Vertical effects in distribution
• The challenge of remedy design and implementation

Case studies: Examples from recent pharma merger decisions

8. Competition in the provision of healthcare

• The characteristics of healthcare services
• Identifying demand: patient, prescriber and payer
• The complex structure of healthcare provision, including alternative models of provision
• Regulation and public financing of healthcare
• Competition in price and quality

Case studies: Examples from recent market studies

9. Introducing competition in public healthcare

• Market-based public healthcare provision
• Scope for competition enforcement

Case studies: Examples from recent hospital merger decisions