Chapter 4: Design choices

Chapter at a glance

The legal framework for an advance market commitment is founded on ordinary contract law. (See the draft contract term sheets in appendixes F and G.)
Our multidisciplinary team comprising lawyers, public health specialists, economists and public policy specialists has considered the detailed design of the commitment with the aim of creating an appropriate set of incentives.
We explain our recommendations for the arrangements for the structure of the contract, the technical specification of the vaccine and the organization of the Independent Adjudication Committee.
Creating a market rather than a prize solves many of the challenges in designing incentives for R&D.
The commitment is designed not only to reward the first producer to bring a product to market but also to create incentives for continuing R&D to create secondgeneration products that improve on the original.
Within this broad framework are a number of detailed design choices and variants that should be considered. This will require further discussion among the stakeholders as the details of the commitment are decided.