Governments and firms often use committees of experts to help them make complex decisions, but conflicts of interest could bias experts’ recommendations. We focus on whether financial ties to drug companies bias Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisory committee (AC) members’ voting on drug approval recommendations. Using the FDA’s narrow measure of conflicts, we find a consistent but weak positive relation between conflicts and voting for approval. Using a broader measure, we find a significant negative relation. We find stronger evidence that experts’ characteristics, such as expertise level, drive voting. We also show that a congressional act that effectively excludes conflicted AC members resulted in a sharp drop in average AC members’ expertise and an unintended increase in voting for approval. Our results have implications for eliminating financial conflicts from medical decisions, which could reduce the level of expertise of the decision makers and lead to unexpected voting tendencies.

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专家委员会的利益冲突：以食品药品监督管理局药品咨询委员会为例

政府和企业经常使用专家委员会来帮助他们做出复杂的决定，但是利益冲突可能会使专家的建议产生偏差。我们着眼于与药品公司的财务关系是否会偏向美国食品药品管理局（FDA）药品咨询委员会（AC）成员对药品批准建议的投票。使用FDA对冲突的狭义衡量，我们发现冲突与投票赞成之间存在一致但微弱的积极关系。使用更广泛的度量，我们发现了显着的负相关。我们发现更有力的证据表明，专家的特征（例如专业水平）可以推动投票。我们还表明，有效排除冲突的AC成员的国会行为导致AC成员的平均专业知识急剧下降，而批准投票的意想不到的增加。