Physician-Industry Interactions: Persuasion and Welfare

In markets where consumers seek expert advice regarding purchases, firms seek to influence experts, raising concerns about biased advice. Assessing firm-expert interactions requires identifying their causal impact on demand, amidst frictions like market power. We study pharmaceutical firmsu0027 payments to physicians, leveraging instrumental variables based on regional spillovers from hospitalsu0027 conflict-of-interest policies and market shocks due to patent expiration. We find that the average payment increases prescribing of the focal drug by 73 percent. Our structural model estimates indicate that payments decrease total surplus, unless payments are sufficiently correlated with information (vs. persuasion) or clinical gains not captured in demand.