We study the welfare effects of parallel trade (PT) considering investment in quality. We thus revisit the case for PT in research-intensive industries. We find that PT may raise quality, depending on how preferences for quality differ across countries. Conditional on quality, consumer surplus...

The impact of parallel trade on innovation in R&D-intensive industries, such as pharmaceuticals, is a hotly debated question in antitrust and IP policy. The well known argument that parallel trade dampens innovation by undermining firms' ability to price discriminate has been challenged by...

We examine a model of a monopolist selling to two segments of consumers with different preferences for quality. We show that if the firm is unable to price discriminate between the segments, then there is less investment in quality. We find that both consumer segments, and society overall, may...

It is widely argued that international arbitrage, or parallel trade (PT), trades off static against dynamic efficiency so that, compared with a national exhaustion regime of intellectual property rights, worldwide consumer surplus rises at the expense of R&D investment. We show that this common...

Study of trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) has formed an integral part of the work program of the Committee on International Trade Law of the International Law Association (ILA) since its inaugural meeting at the headquarters of the GATT in 1993. In June 1995 in...

Pharmaceutical products are developed, approved, manufactured, traded, and used under complex and demanding regulatory schemes. While the intensity of regulation varies substantially among countries, lightly regulated markets are the exception, particularly from an economic standpoint. In this...

Parallel imports have been treated very differently in different countries. In the EU, competition law's very strong (per se) prohibition of restrictions to parallel imports (PI) can be justified by traditional "public interest" concerns related to the EU's objective to promote free trade and...