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Summary. Investigates strategies for regulating inappropriate faculty consulting relationships. This was my Safra project.

Summary. Like all physicians, radiologists in the United States are subject to frequent and costly medical malpractice claims. Legal scholars and physicians concur that the US civil justice system is neither precise nor accurate in determining whether malpractice has truly occurred in cases in which claims are made. Sometimes, this inaccuracy is driven by biases inherent in medical expert-witness opinions. For example, expert-witness testimony involving "missed" radiology findings can be negatively affected by several cognitive biases, such as contextual bias, hindsight bias, and outcome bias. Biases inherent in the US legal system, such as selection bias, compensation bias, and affiliation bias, also play important roles. Fortunately, many of these biases can be significantly mitigated or eliminated through the use of appropriate blinding techniques. This paper reviews the major works on expert-witness blinding in the legal scholarship and the radiology professional literature. Its purpose is to acquaint the reader with the evidence that unblinded expert-witness testimony is tainted by multiple sources of bias and to examine proposed strategies for addressing these biases through blinding.

Summary. There has been an important development in the study of the right of access to public information and the so-called economics of information: by combining these two premises, it is possible to outline an economics theory of access to public information.

Summary. Develops the reform implications of influence market/institutional corruption

Summary. This edited volume was the first of its kind in creativity scholarship to include an ethical dimension in the definition of creativity (separating creativity as positive contribution vs. corruption as devolutionary or parasitic contribution), inviting contributions from the few leading scholars who had at least touched on ethics or lack thereof in creativity. In addition to initiating the book, I contributed two solo and 2 co-authored chapters.

Summary. The law has long been concerned with the agency problems that arise when advisors, such as attorneys or physicians, put themselves in financial relationships that create conflicts of interest. If the financial relationship is "material" to the transactions proposed by the advisor, then non-disclosure of the relationship may be pertinent to claims of malpractice, informed consent, and even fraud, as well as to professional discipline. In these sorts of cases, materiality is closely related to the question of causation, roughly turning on whether the withheld information might have changed the decision of a reasonable advisee (i.e., a patient). The injured plaintiff will predictably testify that the information would have impacted his or her choice, but that self-serving testimony may be unreliable. The fact finder is left to speculate about the counterfactual world in which the information was disclosed. This Article shows how randomized vignette-based experimentation may create a valuable form of evidence to address these questions, for both litigation and policymaking. To demonstrate this method and investigate conflicts of interest in healthcare in particular, we recruited 691 human subjects and asked them to imagine themselves as patients facing a choice about whether to undergo a cardiac stenting procedure recommended by a cardiologist. We manipulated the vignettes in a 2 x 3 between-subjects design, where we systematically varied the appropriateness of the proposed treatment, which was described in terms of patient risk without the procedure (low or high), and manipulated the type of disclosure provided by the physician (none, standard, or enhanced). We used physician ownership of the specialty hospital where the surgery would be performed as the conflict of interest, disclosed or not, and the "enhanced" disclosure included notice that such relationships have been associated with biases in prescribing behavior. We found that the mock patients were significantly less likely to follow the cardiologist's recommendation of surgical implantation of a drug-eluting stent when he disclosed a financial conflict of interest, regardless of whether the disclosure was standard or enhanced. We also found that the mock patients were more likely to choose the treatment when they faced greater risk without it. We did not, however, find that the disclosure made patients more discerning about the appropriateness of the procedure. We discuss the implications for law and policy. Mock patients seem likely to act upon such information, declining the low-value healthcare when conflicts are disclosed. This finding suggests that the information is material to such transactions, and that disclosures may be salutary for medical decisions. Arguably, therefore, physicians already have a duty under the common law to disclose the financial relationships they choose to accept. Other regulators and policymakers should recognize and clarify this duty, and courts should embrace this form of evidence. Methodologically, although this empirical approach has limits, it reduces speculation by fact finders and policymakers, by at least focusing their attention on the right questions.

Summary. In this chapter, we address the topics of stereotyping and prejudice, staying firmly within the bounds of what science has demonstrated. However, in keeping with the mission of this book, we spell out what we see to be some obvious, and also some less obvious, tentacles to questions of public policy. We posed the following questions to ourselves: What are the broad lessons learned that have changed our understanding of human nature and social relations in recent decades? In what way does the new view run counter to long-held assumptions? How should policy involving intergroup relations proceed in light of these discoveries? And, can we speak about "personal policies" that may emerge from the education of individuals about the constraints and flexibility of their own minds while also considering the notion of policy in the usual "public" sense? Our contention is that personal arid public policy discussions regarding prejudice and discrimination are too often-based on an outdated notion of the nature of prejudice. Most continue to view prejudice as it was formulated generations ago: negative attitudes about social groups and their members rooted in ignorance and perpetuated by individuals motivated-by animus and hatred. The primary implication of the old view was that prejudice is best addressed by changing the hearts and minds of individuals, for good-hearted people will think well of others and behave accordingly. However, research in recent years demonstrates that the old view of prejudice is incomplete, even dangerously so. Staying with it would lead to policy choices that might be ineffectual, or worse. Staying with it would be akin to ignoring the evidence on smoking and cancer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Summary. "The Global Corruption Report (GCR) is Transparency International's flagship publication, bringing the expertise of the anti-corruption movement to bear on a specific corruption issue or sector. The Global Corruption Report on education and research consists of more than 50 articles commissioned from experts in the fields of corruption and education, from universities, think-tanks, business, civil society and international organisations"--

Summary. The dominant business model of the pharmaceutical sector is based on the massive promotion of drugs that often do not represent any significant therapeutic advance. Clinical research is therefore run like a promotional campaign. The data obtained from clinical research are primarily used to boost and support sales rather than to improve prescribing behaviour. Three common and widely used corporate strategies are used to this end: ghostwriters are employed to inflate the number of publications showing the drug in a positive light; results that would harm sales are not published (publication bias); and negative data are suppressed, sometimes going as far as to intimidate troublesome independent academics and whistle-blowers. The objective of these strategies is to enable the new drug to gain market share from its competitors. If medicine is to progress, research must be more independent and freed from the commercial imperatives of the pharmaceutical industry.

Summary. This paper explores the empirical evidence regarding the impact financial relationships on the behavior of health care providers, specifically, physicians. We identify and synthesize peer-reviewed data addressing whether financial incentives are causally related to patient outcomes and health care costs. We cover three main areas where financial conflicts of interest arise and may have an observable relationship to health care practices: (1) physicians' roles as self-referrers, (2) insurance reimbursement schemes that create incentives for certain clinical choices over others, and (3) financial relationships between physicians and the drug and device industries. We found a well-developed scientific literature consisting of dozens of empirical studies, some that allow stronger causal inferences than others, but which altogether show that such financial conflicts of interests can, and sometimes do, impact physicians' clinical decisions. Further research is warranted to document the causal relationship of such changes on health outcomes and the cost of care, but the current base of evidence is sufficiently robust to motivate policy reform.