No Free Lunch? Welfare Analysis of Firms Selling Through Expert Intermediaries

The data used in this paper were generously provided, in part, by Kyruus, Inc. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund, Mack Institute, and Public Policy Initiative. Gi Heung Kim and Donato Onorato provided excellent research assistance. Jorge Acosta, Abby Alpert, John Asker, Alexandre Belloni, Colleen Carey, David Dranove, Pierre Dubois, Gautam Gowrisankaran, Ben Handel, Amit Khandelwal, Ian Larkin, Robin Lee, Aviv Nevo, Brad Shapiro, Amanda Starc, Bob Town, Heidi Williams, and numerous seminar and conference audiences provided helpful discussion and feedback. Any errors are our own. Some covariates were constructed using data from The Nielsen Company, LLC and the Kilts Center for Marketing Data Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The conclusions drawn from the Nielsen data are those of the researchers and do not reflect the views of Nielsen. Nielsen is not responsible for, had no role in, and was not involved in analyzing and preparing the results reported herein. This paper subsumes an earlier working paper titled “Physician-Industry Interactions: Persuasion and Welfare.” The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• July 24, 2018