Prescription Drug Advertising and Patient Compliance: A Physician Agency Approach

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes an analysis of both doctors and patients' behavior in an agency model that accounts for the interplay between two highly debated health issues: drug advertising toward doctors and/or patients, and the serious problem of patients' noncompliance with their doctors' prescriptions. Due to the lack of individual data, we propose a structural approach inspired from the industrial organization literature. The model is estimated semiparametrically with product level data on the U.S. market for anti-glaucoma drugs. The results suggest that doctors' prescriptions are directly influenced by the probability of noncompliance, as well as advertising aimed at both doctors and patients. Advertisement toward patients (respectively, doctors) appears to have contributed to (respectively, slowed down) the reduction of the estimated average noncompliance rate.