Herd Behavior in FDA Committees: A Structural Approach

Melissa Newham and Rune Midjord

No 1744, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Many important decisions within public and private organizations are based on recommendations from expert committees and advisory boards. A notable example is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's advisory committees, which make recommendations on new drug applications. Previously the voting procedure for these committees was sequential, however, due to concerns of herding and momentum effects the procedure was changed to simultaneous voting. Exploiting a novel dataset of more than ten thousand votes cast by experts in the FDA committees under both sequential and simultaneous voting, we estimate a structural model that allows us to measure the magnitude and importance of informational herding. We show that experts, voting on important scientific questions, are susceptible to herd behavior; on average 46% of the members take into consideration the sequence of previous votes when casting their vote, 17% of these voters actually herd i.e. change their vote from what they would have voted if ignoring the preceding votes.

Keywords: Herd behavior; expert committees; structural estimation; FDA; pharmaceuticals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 D83 D91 I10 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 p.
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-des
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.593209.de/dp1744.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1744

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().