Sridhar Narayanan

Sridhar Narayanan received his PhD in Marketing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 2005 and is Assistant Professor in Marketing at Stanford GSB. Narayanan has a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Delhi, India. Before coming into the PhD program in Marketing at the GSB, Sridhar worked for three years as a Sales Manager in Unilever, India.

In the first essay of his dissertation research, Sridhar develops a model of heterogeneous learning by physicians about new prescription drugs. The idea that doctors learn about new drugs through marketing communication by pharmaceutical firms as well as their own prescription experience is incorporated in this model. Further, it recognizes that physicians differ on how quickly they learn about new drugs through the same information. A Bayesian methodology is developed to estimate these learning rates at the individual physician level, using individual physician-level data on prescriptions and marketing communication efforts. Further, this research explores the marketing implications of this heterogeneous learning and suggests optimal allocation patterns for expenditure on marketing communications over time across physicians.

In the second essay of his dissertation research, Sridhar investigates temporal differences in the role of marketing communication over the life cycle of new drugs. In this research, two roles of communication are postulated – an indirect role that affects their prescription behavior through the impact of communication on learning about new drugs by uncertain physicians; and a direct role in which marketing communication directly influences which drug they prescribe. This study documents the fact that the indirect role dominates in the first few months after launch of a product, while the direct role dominates later on. The exact time period for which the indirect role dominates is measured. The research also demonstrates that firms could gain by front loading their communication efforts to the early months after launch.

A third essay in his dissertation research documents the role of interactions between marketing mix elements on the Return on Investment from the investments in these elements. This study explores the full range of interaction between different marketing mix elements, including various modes of advertising and communication as well as between these modes of advertising and price in a prescription drug category. It documents significant synergies between physician-directed and consumer-directed communication.

In a different stream of research, Sridhar is investigating the role of self-selection and usage uncertainty in the demand for local telephone service. The structural model developed for this study accommodates both self-selection of consumers to optional calling plans and uncertainty about usage at the time of plan choice. The model is further extended to account for consumer learning about their own mean usage. An interesting finding of the study is that consumers learn rapidly about their mean usage if they are on a measured plan, but learn at a slow rate if they are on a fixed-rate calling plan. Counterfactual experiments are conducted to simulate alternative plans that can increase consumer surplus while keeping firms' revenues unchanged or increase firms' revenues while keeping consumer surplus unchanged.