My colleague Kevin Gross and I have a new preprint up on the arXiv.
Just for fun, rather than a simple text explainer, a thread with some slides for a talk I'm giving at https://www.icssi.org/ tomorrow.
Here's the paper itself: Rationalizing risk aversion in science. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13816
A couple of years ago, we published a PNAS paper that tackles the researchers' side of the story, explaining why grant review panels may be unlikely to fund risky studies.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111615118
The present paper addresses the funding agencies' side, and looks at why researchers may be reluctant to take on high-risk projects even if they are funded.
To get at this, we have think about the incentives that academic researchers face.
Because it's very difficult to monitor the effort that researchers put in, academic scientists are rewarded almost exclusively for their research output.
Rewards come in the form of jobs, promotions, salary, and prestige, for example. We'll refer to these all as wages.
@ct_bergstrom
One structural issue is that research papers are used for two incompatible purposes: Disseminate research results; and evaluate the researcher who wrote them. The spread of citation indexes makes it far worse.
You do need to evaluate or rank researchers. For that, a robust way independent of published results is really necessary. Of course that's a tall order; I have no idea how to do it.
Carl T. Bergstrom
Janne Moren