INDUCEMENTS REVISITED MARTIN WILKINSON and ANDREW MOORE ABSTRACT The paper defends the permissibility of paying inducements to research subjects against objections not covered in an earlier paper in Bioethics. The objections are that inducements would cause inequity, crowd out research, and undesirably commercialize the researcher-subject relation- ship. The paper shows how these objections presuppose implausible factual and/or normative claims. The final position reached is a qualified defence of freedom of contract which not only supports the permissibility of inducements but also offers guidance to ethics committees in dealing with practical problems that might arise if inducements are offered. In our paper `Inducements in Research', 1 we criticised the orthodox view that it is unethical to pay cash inducements to competent people to participate as subjects in research. We argued that there is a reason of mutual benefit to allow researchers to offer inducement and that this is not outweighed by any reasons arising from worries about consent, welfare, exploitation, or bad science. Our paper was incomplete in two respects: it overlooked certain other arguments against permitting inducements, and it did not discuss the practical problems that might well arise if researchers are allowed to offer inducements. Because some ethics committees might (and have) offered these gaps as reasons against changing their anti-inducements position, we have decided to close these gaps as best we can. The present paper discusses the important further objections to permitting inducements that we have come across: that it would create greater inequity, that it would crowd out some research, and that it would inappropriately introduce commercial norms into research. These objections often raise Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702 Volume 13 Number 2 1999 ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1 Martin Wilkinson and Andrew Moore, `Inducements in Research' Bioethics 11 (1997).