Taking the competitor’s pill: When combination therapies enter pharmaceutical markets
研究了联合疗法进入药品市场后的竞争效应，发现若治疗价值足够大，联合疗法会推高药价并可能降低医保计划盈余；允许企业协调定价在统一定价下推高价格，但在基于适应症的定价下会降低价格。
We study the competitive effects of combination therapies in pharmaceutical markets, which crucially hinge on the additional therapeutic value of combinatory use of drugs and the therapeutic substitutability with the most relevant monotherapy. If the therapeutic value is sufficiently large, the introduction of combination therapies leads to higher prices and, somewhat paradoxically, may reduce the health plan's surplus, defined as total health benefits net of drug expenditures. If the firms are allowed to coordinate their price setting, this will lead to higher prices under uniform pricing but lower prices under indication-based pricing. Allowing for the latter type of pricing scheme might increase allocational efficiency, but only at the expense of higher drug expenditures.