Risk, Research Funding Rules, and Social Welfare

风险、研究资助规则和社会福利

基本信息

批准号：
1561257
负责人：
Joshua Graff Zivin
金额：
$ 51.22万
依托单位：
University of California-San Diego
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2016
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2016-06-01 至 2020-05-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1561257&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Risk Research Funding Rules Social

项目摘要

The rules governing the public funding of science tend to downplay an extensive literature in economics and finance regarding the balance of risk and return in designing portfolios. This project develops measures that quantify the importance of project riskiness in selecting research portfolios that appropriately balance incremental and breakthrough scientific innovation in order to improve social welfare. Findings speak directly to ongoing debates about the innovativeness of the current funding system of public science funding institutions and provide valuable insights for private research-intensive firms in a wide range of sectors within the U.S., many of whom are currently worried about how to maintain their scientific edge in the face of enormous investments elsewhere in the world. To estimate research portfolio choices and the implicit weights that respondents place on various features of those portfolios this project uses stated preference surveys and econometric techniques designed for use with discrete choice experiments. A diverse respondent pool - elite life scientists, mid-career life scientists, life science postdocs, and MBA students - elucidates the role of incentives and experience in shaping preferred allocation rules. Experimental variation in the scarcity of research funds also provides valuable information about how tradeoffs between risk and return are impacted by the potential scale and scope of research projects under evaluation.

管理科学资金的规则倾向于淡化有关经济学和金融方面的广泛文献，内容涉及设计投资组合的风险和回报。该项目开发了量度，以量化项目风险在选择研究组合中的重要性，这些研究组合适当平衡了逐步和突破性的科学创新，以改善社会福利。调查结果直接讲述了有关当前公共科学资助机构资助系统的创新性的持续辩论，并为美国境内各个部门的私人研究密集型公司提供了宝贵的见解，其中许多人目前担心如何在世界其他地方的大量投资中保持其科学优势。为了估计研究组合的选择以及受访者对这些投资组合的各种特征的隐式权重，该项目使用旨在与离散选择实验一起使用的偏好调查和计量经济学技术。一个多元化的受访者池 - 精英生活科学家，职业生命科学家，生命科学博士后和MBA学生 - 阐明了激励措施和经验在塑造首选分配规则中的作用。稀缺研究基金的实验变化还提供了有关风险和回报之间的权衡如何受到评估研究项目的潜在规模和范围的影响的宝贵信息。