Should the Feds Regulate Late-Night Attorney Ads? Evidence from an Experiment Involving Attorney Advertisements of Pharmaceutical Drugs

Attorney advertisements are common and make up an important part of the legal and marketing industries. One particular type of attorney advertisement is those seeking clients for class-action lawsuits against prescription drug manufacturers. These commercials usually contain risk information about particular drugs. Like other attorney advertising, these commercials are regulated by state legal ethics boards—often overseen by state supreme courts. However, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements and the risk information contained within them. Given the importance to public health, regulating sources of information about prescription drugs needs to happen in a way that garners public trust. To assess the effectiveness of current regulation and prescribe improvements, we need to better understand how citizens update their risk beliefs about drugs and their trust in different levels of government. To gather insight into these issues, we surveyed over 500 participants about their risk beliefs about prescription drugs. Participants were provided information from different sources, including commercials made to simulate those commonly run by pharmaceutical companies and law firms, and were asked about their subjective risk beliefs. Participants were also asked about their trust in different levels of regulation and how confident they felt in the reliability of information if regulation were to change. This information allows us to use a Bayesian learning model to assess whether people are updating risk beliefs in a systematic, rational way. Combining this empirical model with a review of current and recommended regulation, we are able to make targeted recommendations about how to best regulate attorney advertisements about prescription drugs. The findings of our study likely have implications for regulation of other issues as well, including providing information about important vaccines and therapeutics to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic