This is a talk based on my book Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry, Routledge (2003). In the talk I will show similarities in the statistics of movies and pharmaceuticals and try to use lessons learned in my research on the movies to suggest management approaches in drugs. A big part of the task is getting the statistical model right and I will discuss stable-Paretian models of dynamics and probability distributions. Short summary: the movies are not a normal (Gaussian) business and neither are drugs.
The main reading would be my book, Hollywood Economics.
Other background materials: