Consideration Sets and Their Role in Modelling Doctor Recommendations About Contraceptives

Decisions about prescribed contraception are typically the result of a consultation between a woman and her doctor. In order to better understand contraceptive choice within this environment, stated preference methods are utilized to ask doctors about what contraceptive options they would discuss with different types of women. The role of doctors is to confine their discussion to a subset of products that best match their patient. This subset of options forms the consideration set from which the ultimate recommendation is made. Given the existence of consideration sets we address the issue of how to model appropriately the ultimate recommendations. The estimated models enable us to characterize doctor recommendations and how they vary with patient attributes and to highlight where recommendations are clear and when they are uncertain. The results also indicate systematic variation in recommendations across different types of doctors, and in particular we observe that some doctors are reluctant to embrace new products and instead recommend those that are more familiar. Such effects are one possible explanation for the relatively low uptake of more cost effective longer acting reversible contraceptives and indicate that further education and training of doctors may be warranted. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.