Pricing strategies and economic uncertainty

In August 2019 an unexpected presidential election result caused achange in expected exchange and inflation rates. The objective of this study is toanalyze the relation between market share and the decision of increasing prices inthe pharmaceutical industry in Argentina.Methods: Online weekly data on variations of some medicine’s prices were obtainedusing web scraping, and then classification algorithms (Random Forests, GradientBoosting Machine and logistic regression) were applied.Results: The results were mixed: market share was found to have high importancein tree-based methods. (Random Forests and Gradient Boosting Machine).However, in logistic regression, this variable wasn’t significant.Conclusions: Exchange rate volatility after the election result caused severalchanges on price expectations, and pharmaceutical market structure influencedthe resulting price reactions. Laboratories which owned a higher market share rosetheir prices first.