Here's the latest in a series of papers that suggests that participants who are attracted to e.g. clinical trials by the pay may be those who have the most trouble evaluating the costs and risks. So high pay should be paired with robust procedures for informed consent.
Ambuehl, Sandro, Axel Ockenfels, and Colin Stewart. "Who opts in? Composition effects and disappointment from participation payments." Review of Economics and Statistics 107, no. 1 (2025): 78-94.
Abstract: "Participation payments are used in many transactions about which people know little but can learn more: incentives for medical trial participation, signing bonuses for job applicants, or price rebates on consumer durables. Who opts into the transaction when given such incentives? We theoretically and experimentally identify a composition effect whereby incentives disproportionately increase participation among those for whom learning is harder. Moreover, these individuals use less information to decide whether to participate, which makes disappointment more likely. The learning-based composition effect is stronger in settings in which information acquisition is more difficult.
"we contribute to the burgeoning literature on the moral constraints on markets (Kahneman et al., 1986; Roth, 2007; Ambuehl et al., 2015; Ambuehl, 2022; Elias et al., 2019). Around the world, the principles of informed consent are fundamental to regulations concerning human research participation, as well as to transactions such as human egg donation, organ donation, and gestational surrogacy (DHEW 1978, The Belmont Report, 1978; Faden & Beauchamp, 1986). According to these principles, the decision to participate in a transaction is ethically sound if it is made not only voluntarily but also in light of all relevant information, properly comprehended.3 Our results show that payments for participation can be in conflict with participants’ understanding about the consequences of participation. They further show that the severity of this conflict grows with respect to both the amount of the payment and the difficulty of acquiring and processing information about the consequences of the transaction."
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