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Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy
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To the Editor: It is possible that the therapeutic efficacy of medications is affected by commercial features such as lower prices. Because such features influence patients' expectations,1 they may play an unrecognized therapeutic role by influencing the efficacy of medical therapies, especially in conditions associated with strong placebo responses.2-3 To investigate this possibility, we studied the effect of price on analgesic response to placebo pills.
Methods
In 2006 we recruited 82 healthy paid volunteers in Boston, Massachusetts, using an online advertisement. Each participant was informed by brochure about a (purported) new opioid analgesic approved by the Food and Drug Administration; it was described as similar to codeine with faster onset time, but it was actually a placebo pill. After randomization, half of the participants were informed that the drug had a regular price of $2.50 per pill and half that the price had been discounted to $0.10 per pill (no reason . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Rebecca L. Waber, BS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Baba Shiv, PhD
Stanford University
Stanford, California
Ziv Carmon, PhD
INSEAD
Singapore
Dan Ariely, PhD
ariely@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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