Conflicts of Interest on Committees of Experts: The Case of Food and Drug Administration Drug Advisory Committees
研究美国食品药品监督管理局药物咨询委员会成员与药企的财务关系是否影响其投票，发现用窄口径衡量时冲突与赞成票弱正相关，用宽口径则显著负相关，且排除冲突成员的法律反而降低了专家水平并意外增加了赞成票。
Governments and firms often use committees of experts to help them make complex decisions, but conflicts of interest could bias experts’ recommendations. We focus on whether financial ties to drug companies bias Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisory committee (AC) members’ voting on drug approval recommendations. Using the FDA’s narrow measure of conflicts, we find a consistent but weak positive relation between conflicts and voting for approval. Using a broader measure, we find a significant negative relation. We find stronger evidence that experts’ characteristics, such as expertise level, drive voting. We also show that a congressional act that effectively excludes conflicted AC members resulted in a sharp drop in average AC members’ expertise and an unintended increase in voting for approval. Our results have implications for eliminating financial conflicts from medical decisions, which could reduce the level of expertise of the decision makers and lead to unexpected voting tendencies.