Putting Financial Compensation for Research in a Different Risk Framework

Abstract In the ethics literature, concern about financial compensation has largely focused on the question of how payment could distort research participants’ perception of risk. Such concern about “undue inducement” has particularly occupied institutional review boards (IRBs) and has often led to conservative judgments about how much financial compensation participants can be offered in exchange for their participation in research. Increasingly, bioethics scholars have argued that such approaches to financial compensation in research could exploit participants, on one hand, or create a barrier to their enrollment, on the other. Despite the vast literature on financial compensation for research, there has been substantially less attention to the potential risk that such payment may pose to research participants. The current system of taxing research compensation is one important example of the financial risks to research participants that warrants more analysis and legislative action.