Why do firms sometimes pay potential rivals to not enter a market – and why can such arrangements persist even when many potential entrants exist?

Are these indications of systematic regulatory failures and design faults or just sporadic, random events generated by good old-fashioned “greed”?

In his Inaugural Lecture, Professor Bokhari will examine competition, regulation and market power in health care with a particular focus on pharmaceutical markets where mistakes in policy design can be extremely costly.

He will highlight the central challenge of how to make medicines affordable and widely accessible while preserving incentives for firms to invest in innovation and new drug discovery.

Competition policy and enforcement through litigation are necessary, but are often slow, costly and ex post.

A central theme of Professor Bokhari’s lecture will be the role of institutional design and equilibrium thinking – anticipating how firms and rivals respond to the rules that govern markets, rather than relying solely on after-the-fact enforcement. The examples used will explore how competition policy and regulation can be designed to better meet this challenge.