Incorporating ethics and welfare into randomized experiments

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) enroll hundreds of millions of subjects and involve many human lives. To improve subjects’ welfare, I propose a design of RCTs that I call Experiment-as-Market (EXAM). EXAM produces a welfare-maximizing allocation of treatment-assignment probabilities, is almost i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 118; no. 1; pp. 1 - 6
Main Author Narita, Yusuke
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 05.01.2021
Subjects
Causality
Human Experimentation - ethics
Humans
Models, Theoretical
Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic - ethics
Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic - methods
Research Design
Research Subjects - psychology
Research Subjects - statistics & numerical data
Social Sciences
clinical trial
experimental design
mechanism design
A/B test
social experiment
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Summary:Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) enroll hundreds of millions of subjects and involve many human lives. To improve subjects’ welfare, I propose a design of RCTs that I call Experiment-as-Market (EXAM). EXAM produces a welfare-maximizing allocation of treatment-assignment probabilities, is almost incentivecompatible for preference elicitation, and unbiasedly estimates any causal effect estimable with standard RCTs. I quantify these properties by applying EXAM to a water-cleaning experiment in Kenya. In this empirical setting, compared to standard RCTs, EXAM improves subjects’ predicted well-being while reaching similar treatment-effect estimates with similar precision.
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Author contributions: Y.N. designed research, performed research, contributed new reagents/analytic tools, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
Edited by Parag Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Paul R. Milgrom September 30, 2020 (received for review May 4, 2020)
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2008740118