The use of frontier estimation in direct marketing

A common problem in direct marketing is to identify which physicians are the best prospects for an intervention that would encourage them to prescribe a drug. The standard procedure is to measure how far their prescribing behavior falls short of the level predicted by a regression line. We suggest t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of interactive marketing 2000, Vol.14 (2), p.33-42
Main Authors: Haughton, Dominique, Haughton, Jonathan, Kelly-Hawke, Alison, Moriarty, Tim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Best practice
Direct marketing
Effectiveness
Estimates
Estimating techniques
Family physicians
Interactive marketing
Methods
Physicians
Prescription drugs
Standard deviation
Statistical analysis
Studies
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Summary:A common problem in direct marketing is to identify which physicians are the best prospects for an intervention that would encourage them to prescribe a drug. The standard procedure is to measure how far their prescribing behavior falls short of the level predicted by a regression line. We suggest that a better approach is to determine how far they fall short of “best practice,” as measured by a frontier line. We discuss ways of measuring the frontier and apply the techniques to both simulated data and a live data set. The results show that frontier estimation is particularly valuable when the data are heteroscedastic, a relatively common situation.
ISSN:1094-9968
1520-6653
DOI:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6653(200021)14:2<33::AID-DIR3>3.0.CO;2-L