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The conflict-of-interest discount in the marketplace of ideas

John Barrios, Filippo Maria Lancieri, Joshua Levy, Shashank Singh, Tommaso M. Valletti and Luigi Zingales

No 348, Working Papers from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State

Abstract: We conduct a survey of economists and a representative sample of Americans to infer the reduction in the perceived value of a paper when its authors have conflicts of interest (CoI), i.e., they have financial, professional, or ideological stakes in the outcome of the results. On average, a CoI decreases trust in the conclusions of an economics paper by 30%. This reduction in trust reflects a combination of the frequency of conflicted papers and the bias of papers when they are conflicted. To isolate the second term, we introduce a key construct: the CoI Discount, which measures the reduction in the value of a conflicted paper relative to a nonconflicted one. We show that, on average, conflicted papers are worth less than half of non-conflicted ones, though this effect varies significantly depending on the nature of the conflict. The discount is more pronounced when the conflict involves the interest of a private rather than a public entity. Restricted data access also leads to a substantial discount. We validate our survey based estimates by comparing them to actual biases observed in conflicted papers within the economics and medical literature.

Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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