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Aim: The aim of this commentary is to discuss conflicts of interest and their impact on health care practice, policy and science. Methods: The discussion is based on a selective literature review and my own empirical studies. Results and conclusions: There is growing pressure on medical practitioners, researchers and policy makers to face up to the subject of conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest are often unavoidable. There is nothing automatically dishonourable about this and it does not in itself either detract from the value of the research and clinical work being done or impugn the integrity of the people doing it. However, the issue becomes critical when possible conflicts of interest are ignored. Inadequate awareness and transparency may cause substantial damage, both to the quality of research and clinical practice, and also to the reputations of individuals and of the medical profession and the scientific community as a whole. Therefore, to deal constructively with conflicts of interest we particularly need to enhance the awareness and transparency.

It is often pointed out that conflicts of interest are - or should be - of great importance in social science. However, it seems to be far from clear what a conflict of interest is. The main purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary but fairly systematic survey of dif ferent interpretations or definitions of 'conflict of interest'. Intra-party conflicts are not discussed. As a point of departure it is assumed that there is a conflict of interest between two parties if, and only if, their interests are incompatible. The problematic terms here are 'interest' and 'incompatible'. These are very seldom defined in social science. The meaning of 'interest' is discussed in sections 3 and 4; subjectivistic, objectivistic, naturalistic, and normative interpretations of this term are distinguished and exemplified. The meaning of 'incompatible' is discussed in section 5. It is sometimes held that conflict theorists tend to neglect 'real' conflicts of interest. The content of this claim is discussed in the last section.

In his stimulating book CONFLICT OF INTEREST (Chicago, 1970), Robert Axelrod considers the case of a parlimentary system in which any cabinet requires majority support in the legislature. He states that, if the parties in the legislature can be arrayed on a one-dimensional ideological continuum, conflict of interest will be minimized if the cabinet is formed or supported by parties constituting a minimal connected winning coalition. It can be shown, though, that Axelrod's criterion for conflict of interest in a coalition should be amended to state that conflict of interest in a winning coalition is minimized provided that the coalition would not remain winning if it dropped a party from either end, even if it added any parties lying between those ends. Such a coalition might be called a minimal-span winning coalition. This proposed amendment has a direct bearing on Axelrod's application of his criterion to post-war Italian pol. IPSA.

AbstractThe conflicting interests of evaluators are biasing the findings of some evaluations and experiments, even technically rigorous studies. One improvement would be to emphasize evaluator and investigator conflict‐of‐interest threats in conceptions of validity. Such discussions could suggest ways to assess and avoid conflicts of interest. I explore the possibilities in one highly regarded framework, the Campbellian conception of experimental validity. However, all evaluations and experiments, whatever their methods, are vulnerable, and all conceptions of validity should address such threats. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

This report details FDA's new policies for addressing conflicts of interest in its advisory committees. It also discusses the general requirements for federal advisory bodies.

Utilitarianism has most relevance to "helping behavior" where the agent's action is parametric, that is, the behavior of others can be taken as given. The utilitarian principle has also been applied to strategic behavior, that is, behavior that can be represented by a game. It is shown in this article that the utilitarian objective may conflict with common sense ethics, and where it does not, questions of equity may arise for which Utilitarianism has no answer. Utilitarian writers have paid scant attention to the games of exchange and externality. In neither of these games does the utilitarian approach agree with our moral intuitions. Apart from this, if all goods either entered into exchange or gave rise to externalities, then the utilitarian solution to these problems would be tantamount to a distribution of welfare that maximized total utility. Such a distribution would be unfair to those who have a relatively low capacity to enjoy goods and to those who suffer negative externalities but impose light ones on others or none at all.

In this essay, I discuss the difficulty of sustaining an inquisitorial system of policy research and analysis when it is embedded in a broader adversarial political setting. Conflicts of interest in public policy research exist on a continuum from blatant pecuniary bias to more subtle ideological bias. Because these biases are only partially susceptible to correction through individual effort and existing institutional practices (peer review, replication), I consider whether a more explicitly adversarial system might be preferable to the awkward hybrid that exists today. But there are important disanalogies between policy-relevant empirical debates and the kinds of conflicts we address with our adversarial legal system. If we are stuck with a muddled inquisitorial-adversarial hybrid, we need to encourage norms of "heterogeneous inquisitorialism," in which investigators strive for within-study hypothesis competition and greater clarity about roles, facts, and values.

In February, the online magazine Slate published an article with the title, "Go Away, Ethics Police; Leave the NIH Alone." The author of the piece was Richard Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow at the Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. The "ethics police" to whom Epstein objected were the critics who had pushed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) into adopting a strict new set of conflict-of-interest regulations. Last year, a muckraking series of reports in the Los Angeles Times revealed that some NIH scientists had parlayed their elite scientific positions into lucrative consulting contracts with the pharmaceutical industry. Several NIH scientists had received more than $2.2 million in company fees and stock options. The director of one NIH institute received more than $600,000 from Schering AG and other companies at the same time that his institute conducted studies for Schering and pledged it $1.7 million in grants. Another scientist wrote national cholesterol guidelines while accepting $114,000 from the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

This article explores how the exploitation of key natural resources, diamonds in particular, has contributed to prolonging the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It affirms that the motivation and feasibility of resource exploitation largely explain why external military contingents have remained active in the country since August 1998. Driving forces of war can be identified among elites of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, for whom DRC resources have proven decisive to sustain positions of power. Although most exploitation has been carried out at gunpoint, the use of existing networks suggests that withdrawal of forces will not necessarily stop the massive resource diversion. While a lasting resolution to the crisis needs to ensure due benefits to the local population from their resources, it also requires that stakeholders see peace as a more attractive option than continued war.