Randomized controlled trials (RCT) have become a dominant empirical tool in applied economics. The internal validity of RCTs crucially depends on the (implicit) assumption that the procedure assigning subjects to treatment and control groups has no effect on behavior. We show theoretically that this assumption is violated when people are motivated by belief-dependent preferences and care about ...

The evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is widely regarded as supplying the ‘gold standard’ in medicine—we may sometimes have to settle for other forms of evidence, but this is always epistemically second-best. But how well justified is the epistemic claim about the superiority of RCTs? This paper adds to my earlier (predominantly negative) analyses of the claims produced in favou...

BACKGROUND Amongst several barriers to the application of quality clinical evidence and clinical guidelines into routine daily practice, poor description of interventions reported in clinical trials has received less attention. Although some studies have investigated the completeness of descriptions of non-pharmacological interventions in randomized trials, studies that exclusively analyzed phy...

The management of atrial fibrillation in patients with heart failure (HF) has been an on-going challenge, no clear evidence for a rhythm control strategy until recent clinical trials using catheter ablation. Recently, the RAFT-AF study (randomized ablation-based rhythm-control versus rate-control trial and fibrillation; ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01420393) was published suggesting benefi...

BACKGROUND The Consolidated Standards for Reporting of Trials (CONSORT) statement is a device to standardize reporting and improve the quality of controlled trials. The aim of this study is to determine the quality of controlled clinical trial reports by national peer-reviewed journals in Iran. METHODS In a cross-sectional study, we evaluated clinical trial reports by national peer-reviewed I...