Carl T. BergstromVerified account

What are the downsides of using a bounty model? Whereby a committee in specific areas would vote on important problems and solutions would be awarded. The bounties could even be of the form "Reward to the best research investigating area X" to encourage research of new frontiers.

Please read the paper. We do not advocate a bounty model in any respect.

I have, I wasn't implying that you did sorry. I'm asking your opinion on why the government shouldn't put out bounties and the funding model shouldn't be developed in the free market sphere.

Good question. In short, because basic science research is not technology development. We want researchers to pursue serendipitous findings and promising directions, rather than hewing to some prespecified path. Also: who would you trust to set the target problems?

Bounties could be of the form "Prize for most interesting research in area X" if you wanted to encourage serendipity, it needs not be "Prize for conjecture X". We already trust the funding committees to dish out money, these same people could set bounties quite easily.

"science research is not technology development" True but the incentives need not be different. It's clear the technology industries incentive structure is incredibly powerful and also encourages thousands of workers to collaborate within companies.

Interesting. But even if true, could there not be indirect positive effects within the current system that you haven't considered such as being forced to reflect upon and to sharpen up one's research programs (rather than just ploughing on)?

Very interesting. Enjoyed it. But there's an economic question - how do you choose who can enter? How do you choose how many entries they get? In this current world you'd support institutions that hired a huge number of semicompetent staff & fired unlucky ones...

As you’ve noticed, it’s always a partial lottery. So the entry cost is still rather high. You could always limit proposals per PI as NSF had been doing.

"a contest that rewards good science in its completed form—as opposed to rewarding well-crafted proposals" This is how South Africa and Canada work, right? Every 3-5 yr you tell govt what papers you completed, and they fund you for future work accordingly.

that way, almost no time is wasted preparing grants, and incentives for actually doing good science are aligned with funding. And also, doesn't reward those who write convincing grants but produce nothing from them except more grant proposals.

Like the idea in general but seems like it might bias things hugely towards established names and would make it harder for ECRs to break through.

There is a separate category for young researchers in countries that do this.

That’s not entirely true for Canada. You basically get a bit of slack on the ‘contributions to past training’ portion as an ECR, but still in the same general pool and ranked against established researchers.

I always found the current system an inefficient use of taxpayers' money. Virtually all schemes favour 'perfection' over creativity (with a bit of messiness), and 'experience' (less energy, versatility and flexibility) over potential. Hoping things will change in the near future.