Experiments and subject sampling

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Abstract
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.

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