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Persuasion Bias in Science: Can Economics Help?

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 127; Issue: 605 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ecoj.12515

1742-0350

Alfredo Di Tillio, Marco Ottaviani, Peter Norman Sørensen,

Economic and Environmental Valuation

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).