Economics at the FTC: Pharmaceutical Patent Dispute Settlements and Behavioral Economics

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supports both the competition and consumer protection missions of the agency. In this year’s essay we discuss two issues, one from each of the agency’s missions. First, we focus on intellectual property issues in pharmaceuticals. Specifically, we discuss the principal rationale for antitrust concerns about certain patent dispute settlements in the ethical drug industry. Then, we discuss consumer economics, our recent behavioral economics conference, and how behavioral economics influences our thinking about consumer policy.     

Economics Research at the FTC: Information,Retrospectives, and Retailing

Individual Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cases invariably raise broad questions about consumers, markets, and effective enforcement policy. Recent consumer protection cases raise questions about information regulation. Horizontal merger enforcement has recently focused on retrospective analysis of mergers and the role of the retail sector in predicting the effects of manufacturer mergers. In this paper, we describe research by the FTCs Bureau of Economics that addresses these three areas. We argue that such research is well worth the agencys relatively small resource investment because it demonstrably contributes to more thoughtful policy analysis and better policy outcomes.