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Comment
. 2019 Nov 26;116(48):23883-23884.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1912413116. Epub 2019 Nov 6.

The minimum mean paradox: A mechanical explanation for apparent experiment aversion

Robert Mislavsky  1 , Berkeley J Dietvorst  2 , Uri Simonsohn  3
Affiliations
Comment

The minimum mean paradox: A mechanical explanation for apparent experiment aversion

Robert Mislavsky et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
All analyses were performed on data collected by Meyer et al. (1). Average acceptability of policies A and B (black and white circles, respectively), and of the experiment (gray circle), reproduce results in table 1 of ref. . The acceptability of the worst arm is computed by randomly pairing observations between A and B, inducing the correlation within pair that we obtained in new data: r(A,B) = 0.33. For each of the 7 studies, 10,000 pairs (with replacement) were formed. The lowest-rated policy was computed within each pair and averaged across them. This is the estimated average acceptability of the worst arm. Vertical lines depict 95% (bootstrapped) confidence intervals. Note: results are not sensitive to the imputed correlation of r(A,B) = 0.33. With r = 0.5 the mean of the worst arm is M = 3.51, still very similar to the experiment, M = 3.48. With r = 0.2 it is M = 3.40. The R code to reproduce Fig. 1 is available from https://osf.io/jcwnz/ (7).
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References

    1. Meyer M. N., et al. , Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 10723–10728 (2019). - PMC - PubMed
    1. Mislavsky R., Dietvorst B., Simonsohn U., Critical condition: People don’t dislike a corporate experiment more than they dislike its worst condition. Mark. Sci., 10.1287/mksc.2019.1166. - DOI
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