The two main influences leading to adoption at the individual consumer level are marketing communication and interpersonal communication. Although evidence of the effect of these two influences is abundant at the market level, there is a paucity of research documenting the simultaneous effect of both influences at the individual consumer level. Thus, the primary objective of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature by documenting the existence and magnitude of both influences at the customer level while controlling for unobserved temporal effects. The pharmaceutical industry provides an appropriate context to study this problem. It has been conjectured that adoption and usage patterns of a new drug by physicians—“contagion”—acts as a “consumption externality,” as it allows a given physician to learn about the efficacy and use of the drug. In addition, pharmaceutical companies target individual physicians via marketing activities such as detailing, sampling, and direct-to-consumer advertising. Our data contain the launch of a new drug from an important drug category. We chose two unrelated markets (Manhattan and Indianapolis) for our empirical analysis. We model an individual physician's decision to adopt a new drug in a given time period as a binary choice decision. This decision is modeled as a function of temporal trends (linear and quadratic) and individual physician-level contagion and marketing activity (both individual level and market level). Our contagion measure aggregates the adoption behavior of geographically near physicians for each physician in our sample. Our results from the Manhattan market indicate that both targeted communication and contagion have an effect on the individual physician's adoption decision. A major challenge is to rule out alternative explanations for the detected contagion effect. We therefore carry out a series of tests and show that this effect persists even after we control for the effects of time, individual salespeople, other marketing instruments, local market effects, and the effects of some institutional factors. We believe that our contagion effect arises because the consumption externality is stronger for geographically close physicians. We discuss some underlying processes that are probably giving rise to the contagion effect we detected. Finally, we compute the social multiplier of marketing and find it to be about 11%. We also use the estimated parameters to compare the relative effect of contagion and targeted marketing. We find that marketing plays a large (relative) role in affecting early adoption. However, the role of contagion dominates from month 4 onward and, by month 17 (or about half the duration of our data), asymptotes to about 90% of the effect.new product adoption, social networks, social interactions, contagion, word of mouth, hierarchical Bayesian methods, pharmaceutical industry
This study aims to examine how employees' spirituality influences their job performance and its mediated link through intrinsic motivation and job crafting. Working with a sample of 306 employees in South Korea, the results indicate that employees' spirituality is positively related to their intrinsic motivation, which in turn results in engagement in job crafting and hence is positively related to job performance. That is, the findings of this study show that the relationship between employees' spirituality and their job performance are sequentially and fully mediated by intrinsic motivation and job crafting. This study advances understanding of the positive effect of employees' spirituality on job performance by considering employees' spirituality as a personal resource based upon the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model.
This study develops a stochastic model to capture developer learning dynamics in open source software projects (OSS). A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is proposed that allows us to investigate (1) the extent to which individuals learn from their own experience and from interactions with peers, (2) whether an individual's ability to learn from these activities varies as she evolves/learns over time, and (3) to what extent individual learning persists over time. We calibrate the model based on six years of detailed data collected from 251 developers working on 25 OSS projects hosted at Sourceforge. Using the HMM, three latent learning states (high, medium, and low) are identified, and the marginal impact of learning activities on moving the developer between these states is estimated. Our findings reveal different patterns of learning in different learning states. Learning from peers appears to be the most important source of learning for developers across the three states. Developers in the medium learning state benefit the most through discussions that they initiate. On the other hand, developers in the low and the high states benefit the most by participating in discussions started by others. While in the low state, developers depend entirely upon their peers to learn, whereas in the medium or high state, they can also draw upon their own experiences. Explanations for these varying impacts of learning activities on the transitions of developers between the three learning states are provided. The HMM model is shown to outperform the classical learning curve model. The HMM modeling of this study contributes to the development of a theoretically grounded understanding of learning behavior of individuals. Such a theory and associated findings have important managerial and operational implications for devising interventions to promote learning in a variety of settings.
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