Designing Persuasive Experiments

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Adusumilli, Karun, Vemulapati, Abhi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Adusumilli, Karun
Vemulapati, Abhi
author_facet Adusumilli, Karun
Vemulapati, Abhi
contents Incentives in experimental design are often misaligned: experimenters design and finance experiments to seek regulatory approval, while regulators seek to maximize social-welfare. We propose a framework to resolve this conflict, wherein regulators set a minimum expected welfare threshold, and experimenters optimize designs subject to this constraint. It requires no knowledge of experimenters' private preferences or costs and mitigates strategic Bayesian persuasion. Under normal priors, sampling according to the Neyman-allocation is always optimal, independent of the specific objectives. Furthermore, we characterize the optimal stopping-rule. In a numerical study calibrated to historical clinical-trial data, our framework reduces expected sample-sizes by over 48% relative to classical designs that attain the same social-welfare.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16703
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Designing Persuasive Experiments
Adusumilli, Karun
Vemulapati, Abhi
Econometrics
Incentives in experimental design are often misaligned: experimenters design and finance experiments to seek regulatory approval, while regulators seek to maximize social-welfare. We propose a framework to resolve this conflict, wherein regulators set a minimum expected welfare threshold, and experimenters optimize designs subject to this constraint. It requires no knowledge of experimenters' private preferences or costs and mitigates strategic Bayesian persuasion. Under normal priors, sampling according to the Neyman-allocation is always optimal, independent of the specific objectives. Furthermore, we characterize the optimal stopping-rule. In a numerical study calibrated to historical clinical-trial data, our framework reduces expected sample-sizes by over 48% relative to classical designs that attain the same social-welfare.
title Designing Persuasive Experiments
topic Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16703