Value focused pharmaceutical strategy determination with multicriteria decision analysis techniques

• Top level investment strategy support for a multinational pharmaceutical company.
• Proposition of an evaluation model for investing in the Greek pharmaceutical market.
• 192 therapeutic categories are ranked using a synergy of multicriteria methods.
• Robustness analysis of the results to further support and shield decision making.

The size of the pharmaceutical market and its contribution to the regional, national and international economic development is widely recognized. This fact indicates that supported and efficient decision making in the sector is a matter of paramount importance. This paper proposes a multicriteria assessment system to support top management of a real multinational pharmaceutical company over the investment on new pharmaceutical products. The evaluation criteria are extracted from three points of view, namely: (i) current market situation, (ii) development of the sector over the recent years, and (iii) comparison with other European countries. This research work results in the evaluation and ranking of 192 therapeutic categories for investment purposes in the Greek pharmaceutical market. The ranking of these categories is obtained through the application of an additive value model, which is assessed by the ordinal regression method UTASTAR. In the first phase, the decision makers are asked to rank a sample of these alternatives, inferring therefore implicitly a personal additive value system. In the second phase, all the alternatives are evaluated and a complete ranking is obtained. Finally, the robustness of the results is analysed and measured, given the imperfect determination of the model parameters. For this purpose, an extreme ranking analysis is implemented, calculating each alternative’s best and worst possible position in the ranking.