{
  "abstract": "The pharmaceutical industry operates at the intersection of financial incentives, state oversight, and public scrutiny. We model corporate compliance with a three-population replicator system of ethical firms, active regulators, and active public scrutiny, whose payoffs are motivated by a prisoner's dilemma of first-mover advantage, an inspection game between firms and the FDA, and a volunteer's dilemma in early-stage research. The eight payoff constants are fitted by bounded L-BFGS-B optimization to composite indices for 2010--2024, and a fully sourced dataset of fifteen heavily penalized firms links the model's strategy types to R&D intensity and penalties. The calibrated system has no interior fixed point: an exact identity shows that public scrutiny decays at a rate set by the difference between the regulators' and the public's cost-to-benefit ratios. Without public scrutiny the firm--regulator dynamics are conformally Hamiltonian, so the two populations cycle neutrally around a center, and Lyapunov exponents give no evidence of chaos. Bureaucratic friction $k$, which enters compliance costs as $k^3$, organizes two thresholds: above $k^*\\approx0.75$ regulators saturate and compliance rests on public scrutiny, and above $k^{**}\\approx0.81$ compliance collapses. The empirical friction index crosses both between 2016 and 2020, as the compliance index falls from $0.85$ to $0.60$. Relative to revenue, penalties are highest for the firms with the lowest R&D intensity. Ethical compliance is therefore an oscillating rather than a permanent state, persisting only while friction stays below the combined incentive of subsidies, fines, and public penalties.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2610.33819",
  "author_total": 2,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Alanna Polyak"
    },
    {
      "name": "Thomas Zdyrski"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/dyd1yc9v19r5p.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2610.33819",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "dyd1yc9v19r5p",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33819",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "physics.soc-ph"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1408|Regulation and Compliance Studies"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7223838834",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.33819",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-24",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/dyd1yc9v19r5p.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:35:35Z",
      "native_id": "2610.33819",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33819"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:physics.soc-ph",
      "subfield": "statistical-nonlinear"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Cutting Corners or Saving Lives? The Evolutionary Stability of Ethics in Pharma Medicine",
  "title_text": "Cutting Corners or Saving Lives? The Evolutionary Stability of Ethics in Pharma Medicine",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:35:35Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/dyd1yc9v19r5p",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}