Agent-based Simulation of the Pharmaceutical Parallel Trade Market: A Case Study

The pharmaceutical parallel trade market emerged as a consequence of the European single market for pharmaceuticals, involving multiple players that partake in different types of competitions. These competitions not only affect players’ profit, but also have a significant impact on European people's healthcare access and welfare. Hence, modeling the pharmaceutical parallel trade market provides a way to study the market and to offer valuable decision support to authorities, people, and players involved in the market. Agent-based modeling offers a computational methodology to study macro-level outcomes emerging from individual behaviors while offering to relax conventional assumptions of standard mathematical economic models. Here, we demonstrate a use case of an agent-based model of the European pharmaceutical parallel trade market and investigate its abilities by analyzing various market scenarios.