Title

Offering Pharmaceutical Samples: The Role Of Physician Learning And Patient Payment Ability

Keywords

Detailing; Patient payment ability; Pharmaceutical marketing; Sampling

Abstract

Physicians may learn about prescription drug effectiveness directly from the firm via detailing or from patient experience. Patient-mediated learning is aided by the use of free drug samples. The effective use of samples is hampered by a lack of understanding of its exact return on investment implications. We seek to fill this gap by incorporating the physician's sample allocation behavior in the firm's decision making. We uncover the following implications for firms as well as policy makers. First, we find that the optimal sampling level for a drug category is a nonmonotonic function of patient payment ability and the price of the drug. Second, an increase in the cost of samples can lead to an increase in sampling and a decrease in detailing when the physician's propensity to provide sample subsidies is high. Third, when future market growth is expected to be high (early stage product life cycle and/or chronic drugs) and sampling efficiency is low, the use of sampling is profitable for the firm but leads to lower market coverage than when sampling is disallowed. © 2013 INFORMS.

Publication Date

1-1-2013

Publication Title

Marketing Science

Volume

32

Issue

3

Number of Pages

522-527

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1120.0743

Socpus ID

84878246065 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84878246065

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS