Assessing missing competition in the Indian pharmaceutical sector through drug-level strategy analysis

Abstract

This paper addresses the unusually high prices of branded drugs in the Indian pharmaceutical market. It analyzes why these drugs aren't more affected by generics offering the exact same product companies for a fraction of the price. This can be attributed to a combination of low user trust, a poorly regulated and poorly incentivized retail pharmacy sector, and slow adoption of best practices by doctors. A theoretical extension on reference based pricing theory is developed to explain these market inefficiencies.