But that's completely different. Shkreli's plan worked because everyone else was legally prohibited from selling his product. There was never any period of "dumping", either - he bought the only vendor for a drug, protected by a legal pseudo-monopoly, and jacked up the price.
Calling it a legal pseudo-monopoly is probably even going too far, it was just regulatory friction that stopped another company from setting up production of daraprim, there were no exclusive rights involved.
Well, that's why I called it a pseudo-monopoly and not a monopoly. There was an exclusive right involved, but it was exclusive more or less by coincidence; you have to pay millions of dollars to get a license to sell the product, and only one party had done that. Someone else could have.
You can do that when nobody else is allowed to start selling your product, sure. There's an important difference between being the only vendor in a market because nobody else has bothered, and being the only vendor in a market because nobody else is allowed to compete with you. In the second case, we always see prices "raised to the moon". But it can't be usefully compared with the first case; potential entrants may not exist yet, but they're still a constraint on the prices existing vendors can charge.
