Ball George P, Bavafa Hessam, Blanco Christian C, Park Hyunwoo, Wowak Kaitlin D
Operations and Decision Technologies Department, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405.
Operations & Information Management Department, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.
Prod Oper Manag. 2024 May 9;34(4):698-710. doi: 10.1177/10591478241256644.
Consumers taking prescription drugs have limited ability to ascertain drug quality before taking the drug. After drug use, however, consumers frequently report their personal experiences with prescription drugs on one of the world's largest medical websites: WebMD. Drug reviews on WebMD are a potentially rich source of free-form text that can be utilized to inform firms, consumers, researchers, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the quality and safety of prescription drugs. Additionally, because men and women communicate in starkly different ways, the gender of the reviewer may play a key role in drug reviews signaling drug quality problems. We examine if drug review textual sentiment is associated with the hazard of a serious drug recall and whether this relationship varies depending on the gender of the reviewer. We analyze textual sentiment on drug reviews from WebMD along with 13 years of drug recall data using several hazard models. We find that the more negative the drug review sentiment, the greater the hazard of a serious recall on that drug. This relationship is completely explained by drug reviews written by females; reviews written by males have no explanatory power. Our findings are confirmed by numerous robustness checks. In post-hoc analysis, we explore possible mechanisms by comparing female and male adverse events on the recalled drugs in our study. Our contributions to gender diversity and drug quality literature leads to implications for the FDA, WebMD, and firms that manufacture prescription drugs.
服用处方药的消费者在服药前确定药品质量的能力有限。然而，在用药后，消费者经常会在全球最大的医学网站之一WebMD上分享他们使用处方药的个人经历。WebMD上的药品评论是一种潜在的丰富的自由文本来源，可用于向公司、消费者、研究人员和美国食品药品监督管理局（FDA）通报处方药的质量和安全性。此外，由于男性和女性的沟通方式截然不同，评论者的性别可能在表明药品质量问题的药品评论中起关键作用。我们研究药品评论的文本情感是否与严重药品召回的风险相关，以及这种关系是否因评论者的性别而异。我们使用几种风险模型分析了WebMD上药品评论的文本情感以及13年的药品召回数据。我们发现，药品评论的情感越负面，该药品严重召回的风险就越大。这种关系完全可以由女性撰写的药品评论来解释；男性撰写的评论没有解释力。我们的发现通过大量稳健性检验得到了证实。在事后分析中，我们通过比较我们研究中召回药品上的女性和男性不良事件来探索可能的机制。我们对性别多样性和药品质量文献的贡献对FDA、WebMD和生产处方药的公司具有启示意义。
