Subject Evaluation in Social Experiments
分析社会实验中自利的受试者如何评估治疗方案，利用受试者退出行为揭示其评估，并实证评估受试者与研究者之间的分歧程度，发现约三分之一的临床试验中存在研究者过度认可。
This paper analyzes how self-interested subjects, as opposed to altruistic investigators, evaluate treatments in social experiments. We argue that the attrition behavior of subjects reveals their evaluation of treatments, and we discuss the usefulness of using such data in performing subject-based evaluation. We examine the possible causes of disagreements between investigators and subjects in their evaluation of treatments, and empirically assess the extent to which they disagree. Given that disagreements between subject evaluation and evaluation done by investigators could be due to sampling error, this paper provides an empirical framework for estimating the systematic level of disagreement in the presence of such errors. We illustrate this framework by estimating the extent of disagreement in clinical trials, and we find substantial evidence of over-approval by investigators in about one-third of the trials analyzed.