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Towards Developing an Agent-Based Model of Price Competition in the European Pharmaceutical Parallel Trade Market

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Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2023)

Abstract

The European pharmaceutical parallel trade refers to the practice of purchasing pharmaceutical products in one European Union (EU) member state at a lower price and reselling the products in another EU member state at a higher price. In the pharmaceutical market, pricing strategies are of utmost importance as the market structure and regulations allow only the lowest-priced product to gain market share, making it imperative for players to optimize their pricing decisions in order to remain competitive. Therefore, developing a dynamic and data-driven pricing strategy that takes into account market conditions, competitors’ behaviors, and regulatory compliance is of interest to players involved in this market. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of agent-based modeling as a tool for integrating mathematical modeling and economic concepts and investigating targeted pricing strategies in the pharmaceutical parallel trade market. We achieve this by utilizing agent-based modeling to evaluate and compare multiple pricing strategies through simulation. We aim to identify the challenges associated with developing a dynamic pricing approach in this complex market by showcasing the effectiveness of agent-based modeling. We contribute to the understanding of pricing strategies and their implications in the pharmaceutical parallel trade market.

This work is partly funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD) under File No. 9065-00207B.

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Correspondence to Ruhollah Jamali .

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Jamali, R., Lazarova-Molnar, S. (2023). Towards Developing an Agent-Based Model of Price Competition in the European Pharmaceutical Parallel Trade Market. In: Malvone, V., Murano, A. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems. EUMAS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14282. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43264-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43264-4_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-43263-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-43264-4

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