Persuasion Bias in Science: Can Economics Help?

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    Submitted manuscript, 1.38 MB, PDF document

We investigate the impact of conflicts of interests on randomised controlled trials in a game-theoretic framework. A researcher seeks to persuade an evaluator that the causal effect of a treatment outweighs its cost, to justify acceptance. The researcher can use private information to manipulate the experiment in three alternative ways: (i) sampling subjects based on their treatment effect, (ii) assigning subjects to treatment based on their baseline outcome, or (iii) selectively reporting experimental outcomes. The resulting biases have different welfare implications: for sufficiently high acceptance cost, in our binary illustration the evaluator loses in cases (i) and (iii) but benefits in case (ii).

Original languageEnglish
JournalEconomic Journal
Volume127
Issue number605
Pages (from-to)F266-F304
ISSN0013-0133
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2017

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