Publications
Publications
- 2023
- HBS Working Paper Series
Money, Time, and Grant Design
By: Kyle Myers and Wei Yang Tham
Abstract
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for
influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought
experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,
we offer participants a hypothetical grant with randomized attributes and ask
how the grant would influence their research strategy. Longer grants increase
researchers’ willingness to take risks, but only among tenured professors, which
suggests that job security and grant duration are complements. Both longer
and larger grants reduce researchers’ focus on speed, which suggests a significant
amount of racing in science is in pursuit of resources. But along these and other
strategic dimensions, the effect of grant design is small. Second, we identify
researchers’ indifference between the two grant design parameters and find they
are very unwilling to trade off the amount of funding a grant provides in order
to extend the duration of the grant — money is much more valuable than time.
Heterogeneity in this preference can be explained with a straightforward model
of researchers’ utility. Overall, our results suggest that the design of research
grants is more relevant to selection effects on the composition of researchers
pursuing funding, as opposed to having large treatment effects on the strategies
of researchers that receive funding.
Keywords
Citation
Myers, Kyle, and Wei Yang Tham. "Money, Time, and Grant Design." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-037, December 2023.