Seminar – The effect of voting structure on new product evaluation decisions: Advisory committees at the FDA

Panos Markou, Assistant Professor, UVA Darden School of Business

How should an expert committee vote to reach a collective recommendation on a complex problem? We examine how sequential versus simultaneous voting schemes shape information gathering, discussion and deliveration, voting patterns, and ultimately the decision quality of a committee’s recommendation. Combining multiple data sets based on US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committees’ evaluations of new drugs and medical devices, we leverage a 2007 change from sequential to simultaneous voting to establish three key insights. We show that, relative to a sequential voting protocol, the adoption of a simultaneous voting mechanism by FDA Advisory Committees led to (1) an increase in the breadth of information deliberated by the committee and a change in the linguistic characteristics used by members during discussions, (2) a reduction in unanimous voting outcomes, and (3) a reduction in the risk of an approved drug being withdrawn from the market (ie, an increase in decision quality). This suggests that simple changes in committee protocols can have large impacts on information-gathering and decision-making.

Speaker bio

Panos is an Assistant Professor at the UVA Darden School of Business. His research is built on empirically understanding how firms may effectively manage innovation processes and make better decisions in the face of uncertainty. He is also a firm believer in bridging academia and industry: producing research that is relevant, grounded in practice, and has the potential for large impact. To this end, Panos has collaborated with companies in a variety of industries such as automotive, aviation, banking, and pharmaceuticals. Prior to joining Darden, Panos taught at the MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education programmes at the Cambridge Judge Business School in the UK and IE Business School in Spain. He also has several years’ experience working at BMW’s Research & Innovation Center (Forschungs- und Innovationszentrum) in Munich and the manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, SC, as well as at Delta TechOps in Atlanta, GA. Panos holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an MSc and PhD in Operations Management from IE Business School. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School’s Entrepreneurship Centre.

For more information, please contact with Luke Slater.