Thesis advisor: Julie H. Mortimer / The unifying theme of this dissertation is the growing importance of pharmaceutical products in health care and in society more broadly. The first two chapters use structural and reduced-form models to study the effects of various policies on the choice and utilization of prescription drugs. The third chapter surveys the empirical literature on the competitive effects of a class of pricing arrangements used in the pharmaceutical and many other industries. Chapter 1. One of the criticisms leveled against direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is that it overemphasizes the use of pharmaceuticals at the expense of other forms of treatment. In “Choice of Depression Treatment: Advertising Spillovers in a Model with Complementarity,” I study how antidepressant TV ads affect demand for psychotherapy. Antidepressant advertising can increase demand for therapy if the products are complements or if advertising has spillover effects. To disentangle the different channels, I develop a discrete-choice demand model that allows for complementarity between products, advertising spillovers, and flexible unobserved preference heterogeneity. Individual-level panel data on treatment choices and price variation allow me to separately identify complementarity and correlated preferences, whereas the average price of TV advertising, used as an instrument, identifies the causal effect of antidepressant ads on demand for each product. The results indicate that even though antidepressants and psychotherapy are substitutes, drug advertising increases demand for therapy through a spillover effect. Allowing for time-invariant and time-varying unobservables that can be correlated across products critically affects the estimated degree of complementarity and advertising elasticities. Chapter 2. While prescription drugs have enabled the cost-effective treatment of a myriad of diseases, many pharmaceuticals come with potential for abuse. The growing use of opioid medications for chronic pain led to widespread misuse, addiction, and skyrocketing overdose death rates. In “Did Plain-Vanilla Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Reduce Opioid Use? Evidence from Privately Insured Patients,” I explore whether prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) with no registration or use mandates were effective in reducing the utilization of opioid prescription drugs. Exploiting the staggered introduction of such programs between 2008 and 2010, I use difference-in-differences to estimate their causal effect on the number of prescriptions, days supply, and dosage per capita. Based on data from privately insured adults, the estimation results reveal that PDMPs successfully reduced opioid utilization, especially of high-dosage prescriptions. A battery of robustness checks suggests that the estimated effects are caused by the PDMPs and not by confounding factors such as broader trends in health care, attrition, out-of-state purchases, or other anti-opioid policies. Chapter 3. The assumption that buyers pay the same price for each unit of the good they purchase underlies many economic analyses. However, linear pricing is one of many pricing arrangements used in practice. In “Empirical Evidence on Conditional Pricing Practices: A Review,” Julie Holland Mortimer and I review the existing empirical studies on the competitive impact of conditional pricing practices (CPPs), under which the price of a product may depend on a quantity, share, bundling, or other requirement. Examples of CPPs include all-units and loyalty discounts, full-line forcing contracts, and exclusivity arrangements. A common thread unifying the empirical literature is that CPPs often have both procompetitive and anticompetitive effects and that their net effect may depend on the details of the arrangements and the characteristics of the markets in which they are used. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Nous nous proposons, dans le cadre de cette thèse d'examiner des modèles économiques dans lesquels les firmes ont recours à différentes approches de publicité. Nous analysons les effets des investissements et des tarifs publicitaires sur les stratégies des annonceurs et des médias et nous étudions les différentes configurations de marché qui émergent à l'équilibre. Nous nous focalisons dans les Chapitres 2, 3 et 4 sur la publicité informative ciblée. Dans les chapitres suivants nous considérons que la publicité est persuasive et qu'elle peut créer des externalités aussi bien positives que négatives.Ces externalités peuvent être exogènes comme c'est le cas dans le Chapitre 5 ou endogènes (Chapitre 6).Plus précisément, nous examinons, dans le Chapitre 2, dans le cadre d'une différenciation horizontale, la concurrence en prix et en publicité informative ciblée. Dans le Chapitre 3, nous caractérisons l'équilibre d'un média qui a le choix entre éditer un seul journal général publié dans deux localisations géographiques ou bien éditer un journal local dans chaque localisation, donnant ainsi la possibilité aux annonceurs d'acheter des espaces publicitaires séparés dans chaque édition ou un package publicitaire pour les deux éditions. Nous posons dans le Chapitre 4 le problème du signal de la qualité d'une firme qui lance un nouveau produit, dont la qualité n'est pas connue par les consommateurs potentiels. La firme signale sa qualité à travers une publicité informative ciblée en choisissant la taille du marché niche. L'objectif du Chapitre 5 est de mettre en évidence les interactions directes qui existent entre le marché des médias et le marché des producteurs en considérant que le marché est caractérisé par des externalités de publicité aussi bien positives que négatives. Dans le dernier chapitre, nous étudions les incitations de deux firmes, différenciées par la qualité, à investir dans deux types de publicité : une publicité comparative et une publicité non-comparative. / In this thesis, we develop economic models in which firms invest in different types of advertising. We analyze the effects of the advertising investments and prices on the advertisers and media strategies. In addition, we study the various market configurations emerging at equilibrium. On this basis, we focus, in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, on the targeted informative advertising. In the following chapters, we consider persuasive advertising that create negative and positive externalities. These externalities may be exogenous (Chapter 5) or endogenous (Chapter 6).More precisely, we investigate in Chapter 2, through a horizontal differentiation framework, the price competition and targeted advertising investments when firms are able to perfectly target each type of consumer. In Chapter 3, we model a situation in which a printed media has the choice between editing a single national newspaper published in two cities, or editing two local newspapers allowing thus advertisers to buy separated or bundled ads. In Chapter 4, we investigate the best signalling strategy of a monopoly when introducing a new product with unobservable quality. The firm signals its quality to the potential consumers through informative targeted advertising i.e. by choosing the size of the reached consumer's market. The aim of chapter 5 is to highlight the strategic interaction between media and product markets when the market exhibits positive and negative advertising externalities. The last Chapter is interested in the optimal persuasive advertising and pricing decisions of two vertically differentiated firms given that each firm has the choice to advertise in comparative and/or non-comparative advertising.