Pharmaceutical companies make some remarkable advances. Could they make significantly more of them? It’s possible, but for that to happen, the industry would likely have to change some of its core habits, according to the research of Danielle Li, an associate professor of economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In a recent paper, Li, along with economists Joshua Krieger and Dimitris Papalikolaou, found that big pharma firms are risk-averse. Novel drugs can have big payoffs, but firms wait until they are in especially good financial shape before pursuing…
