A central feature of experimental development economics is the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the effectiveness of prospective socioeconomic interventions. The use of RCTs in development economics raises a host of ethical issues which are just beginning to be explored. In this article, I address one ethical issue in particular: the routine use of the status quo as a control when designing and conducting a development RCT. Drawing on the literature on the principle of standard care in (...) medical research ethics, as well as considerations of distributive justice in non-ideal circumstances, I argue that the practice of using the status quo as a control is ethically justifiable. However, I add an important qualification based on the natural duty of rescue to address the concern that my account is overly permissive. (shrink)

Online controlled experiments, also known as A/B tests, have become ubiquitous. While many practical challenges in running experiments at scale have been thoroughly discussed, the ethical dimension of A/B testing has been neglected. This article fills this gap in the literature by introducing a new, soft ethics and governance framework that explicitly recognizes how the rise of an experimentation culture in industry settings brings not only unprecedented opportunities to businesses but also significant responsibilities. More precisely, the article (a) introduces a (...) set of principles to encourage ethical and responsible experimentation to protect users, customers, and society; (b) argues that ensuring compliance with the proposed principles is a complex challenge unlikely to be addressed by resorting to a one-solution response; (c) discusses the relevance and effectiveness of several mechanisms and policies in educating, governing, and incentivizing companies conducting online controlled experiments; and (d) offers a list of prompting questions specifically designed to help and empower practitioners by stimulating specific ethical deliberations and facilitating coordination among different groups of stakeholders. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate policy interventions. RCTs are often understood to provide the highest quality evidence regarding the causal efficacy of an intervention. While randomization plays an essential epistemic role in the context of policy RCTs however, it also plays an important distributive role. By randomly assigning participants to either the intervention or control arm of an RCT, people are subject to different policies and so, often, to different types and levels of benefits. In (...) this paper, I identify one necessary condition as well as a set of sufficient conditions for the permissible use of random assignment by government agencies. I argue first that random assignment is permissible only if it is consistent with governments’ duty to realize morally important outcomes. I argue second that random assignment is permissible in cases where investigators are in a state of genuine equipoise regarding all arms of the experiment and the policy to which people have a claim of justice. Finally, I defend a set of conditions under which random assignment is permissible in cases where one or more arms of a policy RCT are reasonably expected to be either superior or inferior to this policy. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly making use of field experiments to evaluate policy interventions in the spheres of education, public health and welfare. However, the research ethics literature is largely focused on the clinical context, leaving investigators, institutional review boards and government agencies with few resources to draw on to address the ethical questions they face regarding such experiments. In this article, we aim to help address this problem, investigating the conditions under which informed consent is required for ethical policy research conducted (...) or authorized by government. We argue that investigators need not secure participants' informed consent when conducting government policy experiments if: the government institution conducting or authorizing the experiment possesses a right to rule over the spheres of policy targeted by the research; and data collection does not involve the violation of participants' autonomy rights. (shrink)

BackgroundEarly in the COVID-19 pandemic, the urgent need to discover effective therapies for COVID-19 prompted questions about the ethical problem of randomization along with its widely accepted solution: equipoise. In this scoping review, uses of equipoise in discussions of randomized controlled trials of COVID-19 therapies are evaluated to answer three questions. First, how has equipoise been applied to COVID-19 research? Second, has equipoise been employed accurately? And third, do concerns about equipoise pose a barrier to the ethical conduct of COVID-19 (...) RCTs?MethodsGoogle Scholar and Pubmed were searched for articles containing substantial discussion about equipoise and COVID-19 RCTs. 347 article titles were screened, 91 full text articles were assessed, and 48 articles were included. Uses of equipoise were analyzed and abstracted into seven categories.Results and discussionApproximately two-thirds of articles used equipoise in a way that is consistent with the concept. They invoked equipoise to support RCTs of specific therapies, RCTs in general, and the early termination of RCTs after achieving the primary outcome. Approximately one-third of articles used equipoise in a manner that is inconsistent with the concept. These articles argued that physician preference, widespread use of unproven therapies, patient preference, or expectation of therapeutic benefit may undermine equipoise and render RCTs unethical. In each case, the purported ethical problem can be resolved by correcting the use of equipoise.ConclusionsOur findings highlight the continued relevance of equipoise as it supports the conduct of well-conceived RCTs and provides moral guidance to physicians and researchers as they search for effective therapies for COVID-19. (shrink)

Social scientists and research ethicists have begun, somewhat belatedly, to confront and address the ethical challenges raised by public policy experiments. In doing so however, they have not fully availed themselves of the large and sophisticated literature on the ethics of clinical research which has developed over the past 40 years. While clinical and public policy research are different, I argue that the clinical research ethics literature yields valuable insights for discussions of the ethics of policy experiments. Focusing on seven (...) ethical issues which have received a good deal of attention in public and scholarly discussions of the ethics of policy experiments, I make use of the history of reflection on the ethics of clinical research to provide guidance to researchers planning and conducting policy experiments. (shrink)

Many in the international development community have embraced the randomized controlled field experiment, akin to a biomedical clinical trial for social interventions, as the new “gold evidential standard” in program impact evaluation. In response, critics have called upon the method’s advocates to consider the moral dimensions of randomization, leading to a debate about the method’s ethics. My research intervenes in this debate by empirically investigating how researchers manage the perception of randomization in the field. Without the possibility of a placebo, (...) researchers rhetorically and materially frame the experiment differently for the control and treatment groups. Three technologies allow for this differential framing: geographic separation, temporal delay, and public randomization ceremonies. Geographic separation is a “technology of opacity” designed to obscure unequal resource distribution by disentangling the intervention and research components of the experiment for the control group. The latter two are technologies of transparency designed to expose the element of randomization but downplay conditions that may affect participant buy in. All three technologies work to preclude collective definitions of fair resource allocation, yet they are not fully successful in preventing modes of confrontation and resistance that lie outside of the experiment’s framing. (shrink)

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are a major success story, promising to improve science and policy. Despite some controversy, RCTs have spread toward Northern and Southern countries since the early 2000s. How so? Synthesizing previous research on this question, this article argues that favorable institutional conditions turned RCTs into “hinges” between the fields of science, politics, and business. Shifts toward behavioral economics, New Public Management, and evidence-based philanthropic giving led to a cross-fertilization among efforts in rich and poor countries, involving states, (...) international organizations, NGOs, researchers, and philanthropic foundations. This confluence of favorable institutional conditions and savvy social actors established a “global interstitial field” inside which support for RCTs has developed an unprecedented scope, influence, operational capacity, and professional payoff. However, the article further argues that the hinges holding together this global interstitial field are “squeaky” at best. Because actors inherit the illusio of their respective fields of origin—their central incentives and stakes—the interstitial field produces constant goal conflicts. Cooperation between academics and practitioners turns out to be plagued by tensions and contradictions. Based on this analysis, the article concludes that the global field of RCT support will probably differentiate into its constituent parts. As a result, RCTs may lose the special status they have gained among social science and policy evaluation methods, turning into one good technique among others. (shrink)

We have been asked to consider the feasibility of piloting a Citizens’ Basic Income : a basic, unconditional, universal, individual, regular payment that would replace aspects of social security and be introduced alongside changes to taxes. Piloting and evaluating a CBI as a Cluster Randomized Control Trial raises the question of whether intervention and comparison groups would be in equipoise, and thus whether randomization would be ethical. We believe that most researchers would accept that additional income, or reduced conditions on (...) receiving income would be likely to improve health, especially at lower income levels. However, there are genuine uncertainties about the impacts on other outcomes, and CBI as a mechanism of providing income. There is also less consensus amongst civil servants and politicians about the impacts on health, and substantial disagreement about whether these would outweigh other impacts. We believe that an RCT is ethical because of these uncertainties. We also argue that the principle of equipoise should apply to randomized and non-randomized trials; that randomization is a fairer means of allocating to intervention and comparison groups; and that there is an ethical case for experimentation to generate higher-quality evidence for policymaking that may otherwise do harm. (shrink)