Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>Science funding agencies such as the NIH, NSF, and their counterparts around the world are often criticized for being too conservative, funding incremental innovations over more radical but riskier projects. One explanation for their conservatism is the way the agencies use peer review of scientific proposals. Peer review is the cornerstone of research allocation decisions, but agencies typically base decisions on a simple average of peer review scores. More novel ideas are less likely to gain consistently high ratings across evaluators and are less likely to be funded. Using a discrete choice experiment conducted with a large sample of active biomedical researchers, we find that—in contrast to funding agencies—scientists systematically prefer to fund projects with more reviewer dissensus. Rather than purely focusing on the first moment of the distribution of reviewer scores, they also value the second moment. Further, scientists with the greatest domain expertise on a proposal are more enthusiastic about dissensus, and while appetite for dissensus shrinks as budgets become tighter, it does not disappear completely. Applying our estimates to prior studies mimicking NIH’s review process shows that incorporating expert scientists’ preferences for dissensus would change marginal funding decisions for ten percent of projects worth billions of dollars per year.</p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links https://www.nber.org/papers/w31409 Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199419951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question Sample Trial population and sample selection Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables Results Intervention costs Cost benefit ratio Reference Citation for use in academic references
