Understanding Sample Usage and Sampling as a Promotion Tool: State of Industry Practice and Current Research - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 514

If an “experimentation” role of free drug samples exists, we would expect that a
patient is more likely to receive free samples (rather than a full prescription) of a
drug from her physician if she has not been prescribed the drug before. Furthermore,
it usually only takes a few trials to fi nd out whether a drug is working for a patient.
Thus, if the physician's main motive is to experiment when she gives free samples
to a new patient, we would expect that the sample dosage will be lower in this case.
On the other hand, if free drug samples play a “subsidy” role in physician's pre-
scription decision, we would expect that an indigent patient (e.g., one with low
income or with inadequate insurance coverage) is more likely to receive free sam-
ples from her physician. In fact, a number of studies in the medical literature pro-
vide empirical evidence for this view. Taira et al. ( 2003 ) showed that among elderly
patients, those with fi nancial problems are more likely to receive free drug samples.
Through a patient survey, Stevens et al. ( 2003 ) found that self-pay/uninsured
patients more frequently report receiving free drug samples than patients with pub-
lic aid. Morgan et al. ( 2006 ) fi nd that giving out free samples to help patients with
fi nancial diffi culties was a common practice among the 397 obstetricians and gyne-
cologists who participated in the study. However, a more recent study by Cutrona
et al. ( 2008 ) reported a somewhat unexpected fi nding that poor and uninsured
Americans are less likely than wealthy or insured Americans to receive free drug
samples. As the authors speculate, this fi nding could be partly due to the cofounding
facts that the poor and uninsured might be less likely to visit physicians. Thus, their
access to free samples is more limited compared to other patients. Nevertheless, the
question of whether the indigent patients are more likely to receive free drug sam-
ples conditional on their visits to the doctors remains unanswered and warrants
further investigation.
As mentioned before, the majority of marketing studies have focused on evaluat-
ing the impact of samples dropped by pharmaceutical fi rms on physician's prescrip-
tion choice, but have not investigated individual physician's decision on free drug
sample dispensing. One noticeable exception is Venkataraman and Stremersch
( 2007 ), in which the authors fi nd that both detailing and physician meetings have a
positive effect on the number of samples dispensed by physicians. However, the
authors do not explore further the underlying drivers of physicians' sample dispens-
ing behavior (i.e., whether it is due to the “experimentation” role, the “subsidy”
role, or both). Dong and Xie ( 2011 ) took one step further to provide deeper insights
into physician's sample dispensing behavior by incorporating patient characteristics
that relate to physicians' two fundamental motives in free sample dispensing in both
the sample dispensing model and the sample quantity model. Using a physician
panel dataset of sample dispensing and prescription choices in both the PPI and the
ED categories provided by ImpactRx, Dong and Xie ( 2011 ) jointly estimate a mul-
tinomial logit model of joint brand and treatment mode (i.e., whether to dispense
free samples or to write a prescription) choice and a count model of quantity deci-
sion at individual physician level in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. They pro-
pose that the long-term effect of free samples on brand choice might depend on the
underlying motivation of the dispensing physician. On the one hand, if the purpose
is to stimulate trials through “experimenting,” a physician's free sample dispensing