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Biometrika 1997 84(3):619-630; doi:10.1093/biomet/84.3.619
© 1997 by Biometrika Trust
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Experiments and subject sampling

TOMAS PHILIPSON and JEFFREY DESIMONE

Department of Economics, University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A. e-mail: tomal{at}cicero.spc.uchicago.edu
Department of Economics, Yale University 28 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, U.S.A. e-mail: desimone{at}econ.yale.edu

This paper examines the impact of randomisation and blinding in experiments in which subjects act like investigators by attempting to learn about the effectiveness of the administered treatments. We derive the effects that this type of subject inference has on investigator inference. We show that the conditions under which randomisation and blinding induce unbiased estimation when subjects make treatment inferences are extremely strong and unlikely to hold in most experiments. A test for the presence of such subject sampling in blind experiments is proposed, with empirical results from a set of blind clinical trials indicating the occurrence of subject sampling in about one-third of the trials.

Key Words: Attrition bias • Blinding • Experiments • Randomisation


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