Risk, Research Funding Rules, and Social Welfare

管理公共科学基金的规则往往会淡化经济学和金融学中关于设计投资组合时风险和回报平衡的大量文献。该项目制定了量化项目风险的重要性的措施，在选择适当平衡增量和突破性的科学创新，以提高社会福利的研究组合。 调查结果直接说明了当前关于公共科学资助机构资助体系创新性的持续辩论，并为美国广泛领域的私营研究密集型公司提供了宝贵的见解，他们中的许多人目前正担心如何在世界其他地方的巨大投资面前保持他们的科学优势。为了估计研究投资组合的选择和受访者对这些投资组合的各种特征的隐含权重，本项目使用了陈述偏好调查和计量经济学技术，旨在与离散选择实验一起使用。 一个多样化的受访者池-精英生命科学家，职业生涯中期的生命科学家，生命科学博士后，MBA学生-阐明了激励和经验在塑造首选分配规则的作用。 研究资金稀缺性的实验差异也提供了宝贵的信息，说明风险和回报之间的权衡如何受到所评价研究项目的潜在规模和范围的影响。

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.