Research Paper on:
Economic Analysis of the Pharmaceutical Industry

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
produce a product based on customer demand, pharmaceuticals create a product, then attempt to create the demand for it by marketing through physicians (and more recently, directly to the consumer,  through magazine and television advertising). In addition, these products are uneven when it comes to becoming "instant hits" - there could be the huge "blockbuster" (like Prozac was during the  1980s and 1990s) after a variety of flops. Furthermore, although certain drugs are protected by patents, once those patents run out, the market is swamped with imitations that are less  expensive. In short, pharmaceutical companies that hope to survive the drug market, must count on investing huge amounts of money in labor(such as researchers and developers) and keep inventing huge  strings of drugs. Some are trying to take care of these problems by merging with other companies that are either their own size or somewhat smaller.  For the most part, most pharmaceutical firms dream of striking it big - of researching, inventing and then marketing the drug that will run up sales of  more than $1 billion (Bastianelli et al, 2001). Interferon was the huge blockbuster of the 1980s, particularly as it was found that this medication was the way to treat AIDS  (or at least to help reduce the side effects of this immune deficiency disease). The reality of the situation is, however, that developing  and marketing the blockbusters has become hugely expensive (Bastianelli et al, 2001). As a result, only the very large companies would be able to afford to do so (Bastianelli et  al, 2001), which has, in part, led to a squeezing out of smaller companies. During the late 1990s, this led to a string of mergers within the industry, and fears