Selective Trials: A Principal-Agent Approach to Randomized Controlled Experiments

Sylvain Chassang, Gerard Padro i Miquel, Erik Snowberg

NBER Working Paper No. 16343
Issued in September 2010

---- Acknowledgements -----

We are particularly indebted to Abhijit Banerjee, Roland Benabou, and Jeff Ely for advice and encouragement. The paper beneted greatly from conversations with Attila Ambrus, Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Angus Deaton, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Greg Fischer, Kripa Freitas, Drew Fudenberg, Justin Grimmer, Rema Hanna, Jim Heckman, Johannes Hörner, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, Guido Imbens, John Ledyard, Maggie McConnell, Stephen Morris, Muriel Niederle, Marcin Peski, Nancy Qian, Antonio Rangel, Imran Rasul, Dan Scharfstein, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, Jesse Shapiro, Monica Singhal, Andy Skrzypacz, Francesco Sobbrio, Lars Stole, Chris Woodruff and Eric Zitzewitz, as well as seminar participants at Boston University, Brown, Caltech, Chicago Booth, Harvard/MIT, HEC Lausanne, Johns Hopkins, LSE, MPSA, NYU Stern, the Radcliffe Institute, Stanford, Stockholm School of Economics, SWET, UT Austin, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale. Part of this work was done while Chassang visited the Department of Economics at Harvard, and he gratefully acknowledges their hospitality. Paul Scott provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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