Trials, tricks and transparency: how disclosure rules affect clinical knowledge.
Scandals of selective reporting of clinical trial results by pharmaceutical firms have underlined the need for more transparency in clinical trials. We provide a theoretical framework which reproduces incentives for selective reporting and yields three key implications concerning regulation. First, a compulsory clinical trial registry complemented through a voluntary clinical trial results database can implement full transparency (the existence of all trials as well as their results is known). Second, full transparency comes at a price. It has a deterrence effect on the incentives to conduct clinical trials, as it reduces the firms' gains from trials. Third, in principle, a voluntary clinical trial results database without a compulsory registry is a superior regulatory tool; but we provide some qualified support for additional compulsory registries when medical decision-makers cannot anticipate correctly the drug companies' decisions whether to conduct trials.
Departamento de Economía, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain. matthias.dahm@urv.cat
Matthias
M
Dahm
Paula
P
González
Nicolás
N
Porteiro
D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004345:Drug Industry; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D012042:Registries