Rationalizing risk aversion in science: Why incentives to work hard clash with incentives to take risks.

ABSTRACT: Scientific research requires taking risks, as the most cautious approaches are unlikely to lead to the most rapid progress. Yet, much funded scientific research plays it safe and funding agencies bemoan the difficulty of attracting high-risk, high-return research projects. Why don't the incentives for scientific discovery adequately impel researchers toward such projects? Here, we adapt an economic contracting model to explore how the unobservability of risk and effort discourages risky research. The model considers a hidden-action problem, in which the scientific community must reward discoveries in a way that encourages effort and risk-taking while simultaneously protecting researchers' livelihoods against the vicissitudes of scientific chance. Its challenge when doing so is that incenti

SUBMITTER: Gross K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11326573 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature