The Conflict-of-Interest Discount in the Marketplace of Ideas
We study how conflicts of interest (CoI)—defined as financial, professional, or ideological stakes held by authors—affect perceived credibility in economics research. Using a randomized controlled survey of both economists and a representative sample of the U.S. public, we find that the presence of a CoI reduces trust in a paper’s findings by 28% on average, with substantial heterogeneity across conflict types. We develop a model in which this reduction in trust reflects both the prevalence of conflicted papers and the expected bias conditional on conflict. To isolate the latter, we introduce the CoI Discount: the perceived value of a conflicted paper relative to an otherwise identical, non-conflicted one. We estimate an average CoI Discount of 39%, implying that conflicted papers are valued at just 61% of non-conflicted ones. We validate these survey-based estimates through three complementary exercises: an empirical analysis of actual citation and disclosure patterns in economics, a meta-analysis of evidence from the medical literature, and simulations using large-language models. Our findings highlight a persistent credibility gap that is not eliminated by current disclosure practices and suggest a broader challenge for scientific trust in the presence of author conflicts.
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