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Funding is always limited, so if you are going to allocate funds with limited resources you might base it on a model nature provides: Diversity. While there is
by mootzville 6y ago
Funding is always limited, so if you are going to allocate funds with limited resources you might base it on a model nature provides: Diversity.
While there is no guaranteed way of choosing the right research to fund, an allocation of those funds among a set of common projects with similarities and dissimilarities would yield the most progress -- or at least, the highest probability of achieving progress. But how do you go about calculating the allocation?
There is a good set of papers that describes a framework for performing such an analysis.
M. Weitzman et al., 1992
M. Weitzman et al., 1998
H. Simianer et al., 2003
We built an implementation of the framework described in those papers, and though we are targeting the agricultural sector, we'd be curious to see it applied for other purposes such as measuring research progress, and allocating funds for it.
You can check it out here: https://mostdiverse.com https://mostdiverse.com
Reach out if you want to run some of your own data, we are happy to see this applied to areas outside our expertise.
P.S. We are trying to get funding too! Ha!
- btrettel 6y agoWhat are the complete citations for those papers? In the decision analysis class I took 3 years ago they proposed the framework in the following paper: Matheson, James E., Michael M. Menke, and Stephen L. Derby. "Managing R&D portfolios for improved profitability and productivity." The Journal of Science Policy and Research Management 4, no. 4 (1989): 400-412. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6205534201169943688&hl=en&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=62055342011699436...
- mootzville 6y agoNice, thanks...now I have some bedtime reading. The papers are: 1. On Diversity (1992) - M. Weitzman 2. The Noah's Ark Problem (1998) - M. Weitzman 3. An approach to the optimal allocation of conservation funds tominimize loss of genetic diversity between livestock breeds (2003) - H. Simianer
- btrettel 6y agoHere are the links to the articles moozville mentioned: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/107/2/363/1838289 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/107/2/363/1838... https://www.jstor.org/stable/2999617 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2999617 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800903000922 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...