Research:

The Whole Truth? Generating and Suppressing Hard Evidence

A pharmaceutical company tries to persuade a regulator to approve a drug by presenting verifiable evidence about its quality. The company knows the quality of the drug and always wants to get it approved. The regulator only wants to approve drugs of sufficiently high quality, but doesn't know the quality. The pharmaceutical company generates evidence from a costly, sequential testing process. I contrast the case where the company can suppress unfavourable evidence to the case where it has to report all evidence obtained. I show that the pharmaceutical company prefers the possibility of suppression when the regulator is already close to approving without evidence. The regulator always weakly prefers no suppression.