Tales of competition, regulation and market power – and other stories economists tell their children and graduate students

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.

Professor Farasat Bokhari specialises in empirical economics, with a focus on policy. He is particularly interested in industrial organisation and health economics. Much of his research analyses individual and firm behaviour as well as market outcomes, motivated by concrete policy questions. 

He has examined the consequences of policy interventions such as alcohol minimum pricing and volume discounts, school accountability laws, taxes on antibiotics to address antimicrobial resistance, and the influence of managed care on technology adoption in hospitals. He has also worked on merger evaluations in pharmaceutical and other sectors.

His research on pharmaceuticals focuses on firm strategies and their implications for consumer welfare, firm profits and growth. 

He has studied the welfare effects of introducing generics and second-generation (“me-too”) drugs, the impact of additional product presentations on business-unit growth, and anticompetitive entry-deterrence strategies such as presentation proliferation and product hopping. 

He has also investigated pay-for-delay agreements in European and US legal contexts and the welfare costs of such arrangements.

He currently serves as Co-Editor and Data Editor of Economic Inquiry. Before joining the University, he held academic positions at the University of East Anglia, King’s College London and Florida State University. Prior to these appointments, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.