Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Opinion leaders are physicians who asymmetrically affect the prescribing or
treatment behavior of other physicians. These opinion leaders can be of two types:
“clinical leaders” who are experts in the therapeutic area by virtue of their publica-
tions in top ranked journals and their membership of editorial boards and clinical
trials, and the “market leaders” who are typically large practitioners who are closely
connected to the local physician population and gain recognition by the satisfaction
and loyalty of their patients (Stremersch and Van Dyke 2009 ). While the clinical
leaders are well respected as academicians/thought leaders who publish in leading
journals, physicians have a stronger referral relationship with local market leaders.
In addition, physicians' interactions with national key opinion leaders are not
sustained in nature because these leaders are not local. They hear them and meet
them at conferences or read their publications. Stremersch and Van Dyke ( 2009 )
propose that the clinical leaders will have greater impact on other physicians'
prescriptions than market leaders when there is uncertainty about the effectiveness
of the therapy. The market leaders, on the other hand, are proposed to have a higher
influence on physicians' prescriptions than clinical leaders when there is uncertainty
on therapy side effects. Stremersch and Van Dyke ( 2009 ) also propose that clinical
leaders may have greater impact on the prescription behavior of hospital-based phy-
sicians than market leaders. On the other hand, market leaders may have a greater
impact on the prescription behavior of general practitioners than clinical leaders.
15.2
Existing Literature
The study of social interactions and contagion has been of interest to various
disciplines such as epidemiology, sociology, economics, and marketing. The literature
in epidemiology which studies and models the spread of diseases through contagion
has been the basis for much further research in this area. The Bass ( 1969 ) model in
marketing is based on an epidemiological framework and uses data on aggregate
diffusion of sales. The framework has a specification of the probability of social
contagion implying a positive concave relationship between sales and the installed
base, and measures the implied word-of-mouth diffusion parameters. But the Bass
( 1969 ) model and the models based on this framework are pure mixing models
which do not model the network explicitly.
The sociology literature models the social interactions actively. The simplest
model in this stream of literature is the linear-in-means model, in which the actions
of an agent are linearly related to the characteristics, as well as the mean behavior
of others in her reference group. Another popular stream of sociology literature is
that of discrete choice models of social interactions. Schelling ( 1971 ) and
Granovetter ( 1978 ) developed threshold models of social interactions in which the
marginal utility that some agents obtain from an action is an increasing function of
the proportion of the population taking the similar action. Once a critical mass of
people is involved in this action, the threshold or “tipping point” is reached. The
basic threshold models is the basis for cascade models in the mathematics, physics,
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