Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 18
Pharmaceutical Detailing Elasticities:
A Meta-Analysis
Shrihari Sridhar , Murali K. Mantrala , and Sönke Albers
Abstract Facing maturing product portfolios and growing physician resistance to
their promotion by medical sales representatives (i.e., detailing) in developed mar-
kets, the pharma industry is struggling to develop more effective selling strategies
and appropriately size and deploy its sales forces. In this process, having benchmark
answers to the following questions can be helpful: (1) How effective is personal sell-
ing or detailing to physicians? (2) What is a generalizable quantitative estimate of
detailing effectiveness? (3) How does detailing effectiveness vary by product life
cycle stage and geographic region? To provide these answers, the authors present a
meta-analysis of 373 econometric estimates of pharma detailing elasticities appear-
ing in 48 previous papers. They fi nd the mean estimate of current-period detailing
elasticity is 0.21. Further, elasticity estimates are higher for products that are offered
in early life cycle stages and Europe compared to the USA. Also, product life cycle
stage and geographic location have a signifi cant interaction effect on detailing elas-
ticity estimates. Specifi cally, the mean detailing elasticities of late stage products in
Europe and the USA are 0.17 and 0.14 respectively; while the mean detailing elas-
ticities of early stage products in Europe and the USA are 0.41 and 0.23 respectively.
Also, year of data collection and stage in life cycle have a signifi cant interaction
effect on elasticity estimates. Specifi cally, elasticities from more recent studies of
early stage products are lower than those from earlier studies. This comports with
S. Sridhar ( * )
Pennsylvania State University, 457 Smeal College of Business,
University Park , PA 16802 , USA
e-mail: hari.sridhar@psu.edu
M. K. Mantrala
University of Missouri , 438 Cornell Hall , Columbia , MO 65211-1200 , USA
e-mail: mantralam@missouri.edu
S. Albers
Kühne Logistics University—THE KLU , Brooktorkai 20 , 20457 Hamburg , Germany
e-mail: Soenke.Albers@the-klu.org
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