Innovation Adoption by Committee: Evaluating Decision-Making in the FDA

The FDA is responsible for the approval of new drugs, biological products and medical devices in the United States. As part of the approval process, the FDA relies on advisory committees, which provide independent advice from outside experts. We combine a structural approach with newly collected data from meetings' transcripts to study the process of collective learning and policy recommendation in advisory committees. We quantify the effectiveness of advisory panels, and evaluate changes to its institutional framework. We find that deliberation significantly increases the accuracy of decision-making. Changes in deliberation rules or committee membership do not uniformly improve outcomes.