There is little rationale for direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. Most new drugs offer little if any therapeutic advantage over existing products. Direct-to-consumer advertisements frequently downplay safety information. Physicians are highly ambivalent about prescribing advertised drugs requested by patients. There is no evidence that directto-consumer advertising results in ...

BACKGROUND Illicit or rogue Internet pharmacies are a recognized global public health threat that have been identified as utilizing various forms of online marketing and promotion, including social media. OBJECTIVE To assess the accessibility of creating illicit no prescription direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) online pharmacy social media marketing (eDTCA2.0) and evaluate its potential g...

BACKGROUND Evidence suggests that direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs increases pharmaceutical sales and both helps to avert underuse of medicines and leads to potential overuse. Concern about such advertising has increased recently owing to the withdrawal from the market of heavily advertised drugs found to carry serious risks. Moreover, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ...

This paper examines the concept of consumer hopefulness as an important driver of consumption. Hopefulness is defined as a positive feeling evoked in response to an outcome appraised as goal congruent and possible. This positively valenced emotion arises in everyday consumption as consumers evaluate their current state and try to determine ways in which consumption can make for a better, happie...

We study the welfare effects of an increase in firms’ information about consumer naivete in a simple reduced-form model in which competitive firms can introduce distortionary fees that naive consumers ignore when making purchase decisions. We establish that our model captures many markets—including those for credit, banking, hotels, gambling, and mobile phones—in which consumer naivete has been...

BACKGROUND The current direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) guidelines were developed with print, television, and radio media in mind, and there are no specific guidelines for online banner advertisements. OBJECTIVE This study evaluates how well Internet banner ads comply with existing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines for DTCA in other media. METHODS A content analysis was per...

BACKGROUND Direct to consumer advertising is increasingly used by the pharmaceutical industry, but its benefits and harms have yet to be summarised in a comprehensive and rigorous manner. METHODS A systematic review was conducted of robust evaluations of the impact (positive and negative) of direct to consumer advertising. A broad range of databases and data sources (including Cinahl, Embase,...