Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 16, 2026

A Novel Method for Involving Women of Color at High Risk for Preterm Birth in Research Priority Setting
Published on: January 12, 2018
Publication selection in health policy research: the winner's curse hypothesis
Joan Costa-Font1, Alistair McGuire, Tom Stanley
1Department of Social Policy and LSE Health, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom. j.costa-font@lse.ac.uk
Abstract:
There is a widely discussed problem of publication bias in medical and health services research. Where quantitative effects form the basis of a publication a 'winner's curse' curse may apply. This phenomenon may occur as prospective authors of research papers compete by reporting 'more extreme and spectacular results' in order to increase the chances of their paper being accepted for publication. This paper examines this phenomenon using quantitative findings on income and price elasticities as reported in health economics research. We find robust statistical evidence that higher-impact journals preferentially report larger empirical estimates of these elasticities. That is, we find robust evidence of a winner's curse hypothesis contributing to the existence of publication bias found in both the income and the price elasticities of health care and drugs, as well as value of life research.
Related Concept Videos
Bias
In statistics, a sampling bias is created when a sample is collected from a population, and some members of the population are not as likely to be chosen as others (remember, each member...
Bias in Epidemiological Studies
Models of Health Promotion and Illness Prevention II
The agent-host-environment model states that disease results from...
Models of Health Promotion and Illness Prevention I
The health belief model (HBM) attempts to predict health-related behavior in specific belief patterns. According to the HBM, a person's...
Limits to Natural Selection
Censoring Survival Data

