Three essays on the development and diffusion of pharmaceutical innovations

The thesis comprises three essays on various aspects of the development and diffusion of pharmaceutical innovations, woven together by the idea that the production of clinical knowl- edge influences organizational design, pricing, and advertising decisions in the pharmaceutical industry - that it is an essential ingredient of pharmaceutical firms' technology strategy. The first essay studies why pharmaceutical firms partly contract out the operational aspects of clinical trials to Contract Research Organizations. Using detailed project-level data, I find that (1) outsourcing intensity is sensitive to surprises in the demand for clinical trials services; (2) data-intensive projects are more likely to be outsourced than knowledge-intensive projects; (3) firms that consistently increased their share of outsourced activity over time had more productive internal teams than those that did not. This last result draws attention to the perils of considering a single transaction as the unit of analysis when explaining shifts in firm boundaries.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Azoulay, Pierre

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rebecca M. Henderson, Robert S. Gibbons and Scott Stern.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16761

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16761