Risk, Research Funding Rules, and Social Welfare

管理科学公共资助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与回报平衡的大量文献。本项目制定了量化项目风险在选择研究组合中的重要性的措施，以适当地平衡渐进式和突破性的科学创新，以提高社会福利。研究结果直接说明了当前公共科学资助机构资助体系的创新性，并为美国范围广泛的私营研究密集型公司提供了有价值的见解，其中许多公司目前担心如何在面对世界其他地方的巨额投资时保持其科学优势。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，本项目使用陈述偏好调查和设计用于离散选择实验的计量经济学技术。来自各行各业的受访者——精英生命科学家、职业生涯中期的生命科学家、生命科学博士后和MBA学生——阐明了激励和经验在形成优先分配规则中的作用。研究资金稀缺的实验变化也提供了有价值的信息，说明在评估的研究项目的潜在规模和范围如何影响风险和回报之间的权衡。

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.