This may be true, but I think it has more to do with people's willingness to pay more for treatments (over time), than for cures (one time expense). This is an unfortunate irrationality that I think is probably the source of this problem, to the extent that it exists.
All else equal, people should be willing to pay a bit more (in terms of lifetime cost) for a cure than a treatment (certainty, finality premium). If that is the case, then cures are always at least equally worth developing. If that's not the case however, then yes we do indeed run into a bad local minima.
> All else equal, people should be willing to pay a bit more (in terms of lifetime cost) for a cure than a treatment (certainty, finality premium).
This certainly isn't true in social games. If anything it's the opposite - players will commonly pay more in subscription fees than they would for a total one time unlock of everything, since the immediate short term payment is less.
All else equal, people should be willing to pay a bit more (in terms of lifetime cost) for a cure than a treatment (certainty, finality premium). If that is the case, then cures are always at least equally worth developing. If that's not the case however, then yes we do indeed run into a bad local minima.