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.
Carl T. Bergstrom
John Quiggin