The adoption of new prescription drugs is strongly associated with prior category prescribing rate

• This replication paper provides an emergent generalization that early adopters of new drugs tend to be heavy category users.
• The findings challenge the importance of social effects in early adoption.
• The paper replicates and extends the key studies in the domain and also a study from the unrelated area of consumer packaged goods.

We investigate whether doctors who adopt a new drug in its first year on the market tend to be heavier category prescribers. Early studies of pharmaceutical prescribing and packaged goods purchasing suggest that innovators are heavier category users; however, this finding has received little attention and the evidence remains sparse. We examine the adoption of 36 new drugs by doctors in the United Kingdom and find that, on average, the prior category prescribing rate of innovators is about 50% higher than that of non-innovators.