Product details

Since its inception in 1997, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) had been trying to control drug prices through various supply side initiatives, which had yielded limited success. This time around, NPPA had announced a new initiative, which was aimed at educating consumers about the inexpensive alternatives for medicines prescribed by the doctor. By giving the consumers information about various brands and their prices, NPA hoped to offer customer self-selection of drugs through short message service (SMS, also known as texting). NPPA appeared to be operating on the premise that customer self-selection could result in self-regulation of consumption thereby giving greater control of health care expenses to the customers. Given the huge penetration of mobile phones in the country and the gradual reduction of various mobile service charges, text-based service looked feasible.However, the proposed system had met with strong opposition from other stakeholders, such as doctors and chemists. Besides, the large-scale adoption of the proposed service was being questioned as the decision-making unit (DMU) and the decision-making process (DMP) for medicines was very complex. Neither the conventional hierarchy of effects model nor the sophisticated consumer models were applicable in totality in this context, given the customers' inability to process information rationally and the tendency to replace the 'missing information' with 'perceptual bias'.