PhD Thesis

Here you can find my PhD thesis, presentation slides, and replication code. I model the marketing of pharmaceutical drugs to physicians (detailing) with a novel 2-side market involving strategic decisions by both firms and physicians. I argue that information frictions feature prominently in the adoption of new pharmaceutical drugs and incorporate this into a prescription choice model. I use these two models to quantify how detailing can address information frictions in physician prescription choices and evaluate patient welfare and new product uptake under different detailing policies. I find that detailing corrects a moderate amount of total information frictions, that the physician’s role in accepting detailing interactions is much more important than firms', and that a cap on annual physician detailing is weakly better than an outright ban.