Anticompetitive Mergers — Pharmaceutical Buyouts as a Strategy for Maintaining Market Dominance

Pharmaceutical “killer acquisitions,” in which incumbent firms buy out smaller competitors to shelve or delay their products, pose a threat to competition and innovation that current antitrust frameworks under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act are poorly equipped to catch. The authors recommend coordinated legislative and regulatory reforms to better protect competition and patient interests, including lowering notification thresholds for concentrated industries, accounting for intangible assets like patents in merger valuations, and applying heightened scrutiny to acquisitions involving overlapping products.