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  1. What makes randomized controlled trials so successful—for now? Or, on the consonances, compromises, and contradictions of a global interstitial field.Malte Neuwinger - forthcoming - Theory and Society:1-32.
    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, (...)
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  • The Ethics of Online Controlled Experiments (A/B Testing).Andrea Polonioli, Riccardo Ghioni, Ciro Greco, Prathm Juneja, Jacopo Tagliabue, David Watson & Luciano Floridi - 2023 - Minds and Machines 33 (4):667-693.
    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 (...)
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  • What is the standard of care in experimental development economics?Marcos Picchio - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (2):205-226.
    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 (...)
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  • The Ethics of Public Policy Experiments: Lessons from Clinical Research Ethics.Douglas MacKay - 2020 - In Ana S. Iltis & Douglas MacKay (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  • For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics.Alex John London - 2021 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    The foundations of research ethics are riven with fault lines emanating from a fear that if research is too closely connected to weighty social purposes an imperative to advance the common good through research will justify abrogating the rights and welfare of study participants. The result is an impoverished conception of the nature of research, an incomplete focus on actors who bear important moral responsibilities, and a system of ethics and oversight highly attuned to the dangers of research but largely (...)
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  • Uses of equipoise in discussions of the ethics of randomized controlled trials of COVID-19 therapies.Charles Weijer & Hayden P. Nix - 2021 - BMC Medical Ethics 22 (1):1-8.
    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 (...)
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  • What Are the Implications of Applying Equipoise in Planning Citizens Basic Income Pilots in Scotland?Gerry McCartney, Neil Craig, Fiona Myers, Wendy Hearty & Coryn Barclay - 2021 - Public Health Ethics 14 (1):109-116.
    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 (...)
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  • Fairness in the Field: The Ethics of Resource Allocation in Randomized Controlled Field Experiments.Margarita S. Rayzberg - 2019 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 44 (3):371-398.
    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, (...)
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  • Government Policy Experiments and the Ethics of Randomization.Douglas MacKay - 2020 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 48 (4):319-352.
    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 (...)
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  • Government Policy Experiments and Informed Consent.Douglas MacKay & Averi Chakrabarti - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):188-201.
    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 (...)
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