Physician information acquisition and believability. A field experiment on source and type of information

An experiment was conducted to assess the impact of type of source (colleague, salesperson, advertisement) and type of information (positive vs. negative) on physician believability of information. Results indicate personal sources of information are perceived as providing more believable information than advertisements. In general, positive information about a product seems to be more believable than negative information. Implications for effectively targeting the busy physician are provided for health care researchers, practitioners, and public policy officials. Finally, future research directions are discussed.