Comment on Fixing Moral Hazards In Business Science

Sun, 19 Oct 2014 15:57:21 GMT

You ship both a placebo package and a non-placebo package to the participant, and have them flip a coin to decide which one to use. They either throw away or disregard the other package for the duration of the study.

That's possible but it means that you double your product costs. The advantage would be that you can do crossover trials.

In the case of your probiotic a crossover trial might to worthwhile even without this reason.

In this case you could encrypt a list with products ID for placebos and non-placebos before you ship your product. The participant has no opportunity to know which of the two products are placebos.

When he starts the study the participant puts the product ID of the product he decides to use into the webapp. He also puts the ID of the product he doesn't want to use in the webapp.

The participant has no way to decide between the two packages or know which one is the placebo and which one is the real thing so he doesn't need to go through the process of flipping a real coin.

Once the study is finished you releases the decryption key that can be used to distinguish placebos from real products. You can give the decryption key to a trusted third-party organisation so that your company can't prevent the results of the study from being published.

You ship N packages to Total/N participants. The participants which receive N packages then randomly assigns himself a package, and randomly distributes the remaining (N-1) packages to other participants.

That means the participants has to do the work of going to the post office and remailing packages. Some of them will require additional time to remail and it might produce complications.

About the shipping of products and placebos to people, I see a physical way of doing it, but it is definitely not scalable.

Maybe you can win a company such as Amazon as a partner for distribution. Amazon warehouses can store both products and placebos and ship randomly.

For Amazon it should be relatively little work and it could be good PR.

Labels don't have to be printed on the bottle. Amazon has the capabilities of adding a paper with study instructions to a shipment and that paper can contain a unique ID for the product. Amazon could again publish an encrypted version of the ID at the beginning of the study and release the decryption key at the end of the study.

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