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Brand-name pharmaceutical companies have engaged in a variety of business conduct that has increased price. One of these activities involves “product hopping,” or brand switches from one version of a drug to another. The antitrust analysis of product hopping implicates antitrust law, patent law, the Hatch–Waxman Act, and state drug product selection laws, as well as uniquely complicated markets characterized by buyers different from decision makers. As a result, courts have offered inconsistent approaches to product hopping.

In this chapter, we offer a framework that courts and government enforcers can employ to analyze product hopping. The framework is the first to incorporate the characteristics of the pharmaceutical industry. It defines a “product hop” to include instances in which the manufacturer (1) reformulates the product to make the generic nonsubstitutable and (2) encourages doctors to write prescriptions for the reformulated rather than the original product.

When the conduct meets both requirements, our framework offers two stages of analysis. First, we propose two safe harbors to ensure that the vast majority of reformulations will not face antitrust review. Second, the framework examines whether the hop passes the “no-economic-sense” test, determining if the behavior would make economic sense if the hop did not have the effect of impairing generic competition. Showing just how far the courts have veered from justified economic analysis, the test would recommend a different analysis than that used in each of the five product-hopping cases that have been litigated to date, and a different outcome in two of them.

Purpose — The overall quality of an information retrieval system depends on many different aspects of the system and its users' information seeking behaviour, such as the speed of the system, the user interface, the query language and the features provided by the engine. One of the most important aspects is the effectiveness of the retrieval system, i.e. its ability to retrieve items that are relevant to the information need of an end user. This chapter focuses on methods for measuring effectiveness, in particular focusing on recent work that more directly models the utility of an engine to its users.

Methodology/approach — We discuss traditional approaches to effectiveness evaluation based on test collections, then transition to approaches based on test collections along with explicit models of user interaction with search results. We contrast this with approaches for which the user is ‘in the loop’, such as user studies and online evaluations.

Research limitations/implications — If it were possible to model users perfectly, we could directly estimate the utility of a search engine to its users; this would undoubtedly have a transformative effect on information retrieval and web search research. In practice, this goal will never be achievable because users exhibit far too much variability in how they approach the search engine, and furthermore provide valuable feedback that models and simulations cannot provide. Nevertheless, better models of user interaction will help develop better web search engines for a wider variety of tasks more rapidly.

Originality/value of paper — This is the first work that surveys recent work on user model-based evaluation and places it in a context with traditional evaluation based on the Cranfield paradigm.

In times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 global pandemic, journalists who write about biomedical information must have the strategic aim to be clearly and easily understood by everyone. In this study, we assume that journalistic discourse could benefit from language redundancy to improve clarity and simplicity aimed at science popularization. The concept of language redundancy is theoretically discussed with the support of discourse analysis and information theory. The methodology adopted is a corpus-based qualitative approach. Two corpora samples with Brazilian Portuguese (BP) texts on Covid-19 were collected. One with texts from a monthly science digital magazine called Pesquisa FAPESP aimed at students and researchers for scientific information dissemination and the other with popular language texts from a news Portal G1 (Rede Globo) aimed at unspecified and/or non-specialized readers. The materials were filtered with two descriptors: “vaccine” and “test.” Preliminary analysis of examples from these materials revealed two categories of redundancy: paraphrastic and polysemic. Paraphrastic redundancy is based on concomitant language reformulation of words, sentences, text excerpts, or even larger units. Polysemic redundancy does not easily show material evidence, but is based on cognitively predictable semantic association in socio-cultural domains. Both kinds of redundancy contribute, each in their own way, to improving text readability for science popularization in Brazil.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop the idea of Innovative Laboratories as a learning format which can be used to create public value in a Danish context by specifically coping with strategic challenges which takes the form of paradoxes.

The learning format is theoretically informed by Niklas Luhmann’s functional approach as well as based on concrete teaching experiences within the course on strategy which is an integral part of the Master of Public Administration, CBS.

The structure and processes of Innovative Laboratories incorporate the idea of theoretical perspectives as contingent ways of observing and apply this idea to the way strategic problems are reformulated by the participants and thus to how new strategic solutions become viable.

As such, the laboratories represent a way of innovation, as the most valuable part of the process is not to find a solution but to create a new problem by reformulation. This innovation process is captured by the metaphor of ‘managination’.

Our hypothesis about the failure of SRI as the new mainstream a series of profound misunderstandings about CSR and SRI among the various stakeholders, that is ‘responsible’ companies that are practitioners of CSR, academic theorists, asset management companies, SRI finance professionals, rating agencies and non-financial analysts.

This chapter presents a ‘bottom-up’ approach that reintroduces the long-term horizon in investment decisions and focus on the adaptability and innovation capacities of the firms (and States) in front of the unprecedented challenges of the century.

The severity of the repeated financial crises and the challenges associated with global sustainability call urgently for responsible finance. Despite praise from institutional investors, SRI is far from the norm and has met very limited success with private investors and retail networks.

To truly reconcile finance and sustainability we first need to go beyond the traditional dilemma between ethics and performance which considers any non-financial criteria as a severe constraint and foster a contributive conception of sustainable prosperity, for public and private agent as well.

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of ethical decision making by managers employed in two major companies in the U.K. Forty managers from these large commercial organizations were interviewed about how ethical issues arise and are dealt with at work. This interview data was transcribed and a thematic content analysis was conducted in order to explore the various influences upon managerial ethical decision making. The analysis framework includes analysis at both an individual level, in terms of the role of individual characteristics such as personal value systems, and at an organizational level, in terms of the influence of organizational characteristics such as organizational culture. The paper then goes on to examine the extent to which this empirically-based account of ethical decision making is congruent with, or runs contrary to, some of the main theoretical propositions contained in the ethical decision-making literature. This provided only limited empirical support for the theoretical propositions described in the literature. In particular, the findings of the empirical work reported here suggest that while personal values may play a part in organizational ethics, the ethical decision-making process itself is subject to a much greater influence from the everyday demands and commercial pressures which managers perceived as being placed upon them in the types of organizations examined in this study. Thus, while supportive of the notion that values may be important in some respects, the study suggests that they are not necessarily that closely involved with the actual decision-making process. Rather the evidence gathered in this study indicates that they can exert an affectively-mediated retrospective effect. This possibility would suggest a reformulation of the role of values in the ethical decision-making process, while also calling for a greater emphasis upon the role of emotions. These are, however, only tentative findings and must therefore be subject to further empirical work before the precise way in which ethical issues arise, unfold and are dealt with in the workplace can be understood.

This paper examines the recent process of transformation within the World Bank as a series of reactive mediations to the crisis-laden course of capitalist development on a global scale over the last two decades. Two aspects of the Bank’s attempt to construct a new development agenda as a response to contradictions emergent within neoliberal-style social restructuring are highlighted. First, it has embraced the theoretical trends and policy implications of institutional economics. Second, it has refashioned its relations with client countries and their civil societies under the rubrics of “ownership,” “participation” and “empowerment.” The paper proceeds to indicate why the Bank’s current reformulation of development theory presents itself within mainstream theoretical paradigms as an appropriate prescription to counter the crisis of neoliberal-style social restructuring. Concurrently, on the basis of a materialist critique of capitalist development, the paper proceeds to indicate the substantive limits to these present reforms by indicating their theoretical weaknesses and their practical contradictions.

The core goal of the “micro-foundational” agenda appears to be less an institutionalism founded in the micro, or reduced to the micro, and more some form of integrative institutionalism: that is, an institutionalism that does justice to the perpetual, co-constitutive interplay of local activities (the micro) and trans-local patterns (the macro). In this chapter, thus, the authors argue for a conscious, explicit embrace of integrative institutionalism; and of the broader agenda that this terminology opens up. Based on this overdue rewording the authors highlight additional problems and possibilities – providing a constructive reformulation and elaboration of the “micro-foundational” agenda as it currently stands.