Abstract
The balance between incentivizing innovation through exclusivity protection and maintaining competitive market conditions—including prices for consumers—is a difficult line to toe. Product hopping has characteristics that constitute a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act because companies can maintain monopoly power in the pharmaceutical market. While some monopoly power is justified as an incentive for incredibly costly innovation, extended periods of exclusivity harms consumers by keeping prescription drug prices artificially inflated. Allowing generic drug manufacturers to compete sooner in the prescription drug market by disallowing product hopping by name-brand pharmaceutical drug companies will aid in driving down prices. Courts should adopt the Second Circuit’s test for whether a particular activity by a pharmaceutical drug company is monopolistic and a violation of the Sherman Act.
Recommended Citation
Daniel Burke,
An Examination of Product Hopping by Brand-Name Prescription Drug Manufacturers: The Problem and a Proposed Solution,
66 Clev. St. L. Rev.
415
(2018)
available at https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clevstlrev/vol66/iss2/8