Persuasion Bias in Science: Can Economics Help?

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 ).