Academic

Two articles of mine have been recently published and are available online.  The first article, published in 49 Arizona Law Review is Making Sense of Nonsense: Intellectual Property, Antitrust, and Market Power.  Here's the abstract:

While the economic rationale for intellectual property ("IP") rights rests on the concepts of "monopoly" or "market power," the U.S. Supreme Court, in Illinois Tool Works v. Independent Ink, has recently joined a "virtual consensus" among antitrust commentators believing that no presumption of market power should exist in antitrust cases involving IP. This Article critically analyzes this consensus, and clarifies the relationship between IP and market power, shows why IP rights often do confer market power in the antitrust sense, but also explains why acknowledging this should not necessarily lead to oversized application of antitrust law to IP.

The second article is Pharmaceutical Lemons: Innovation and Regulation in the Drug Industry, published in 14 Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review.  Here's the abstract:

Before a new drug can be marketed the Food and Drug Administration must be satisfied that it is safe and effective. According to conventional wisdom, the cost and delay involved in this process diminish the incentives to invest in the development of new drugs. Accordingly, several reforms aimed at restoring such incentives have been implemented and others have been advocated.

This paper challenges the central argument in the debate on the topic, namely that drug regulation and drug innovation are necessarily at odds with each other. Although intuitively appealing, the argument that drug regulation negatively affects the incentives to innovate does not fully capture the role that regulation plays in this industry. This paper shows that the regulatory framework is not solely a burden imposed on the industry; it also provides a valuable service to the industry.

Specifically, drug regulation provides certification of drug quality. Such certification, which may not be easily achieved by private market-based mechanisms, prevents the market from becoming a market for "lemons". Therefore, rather than decreasing the expected returns to innovation, this aspect of regulation contributes to the value of new drugs and may actually encourage innovation. This point has largely been absent from most cost-benefit analyses of drug regulation, yet without it any discussion of the merits of regulation is incomplete.

Comments are welcome.