Collaborative Research: Understanding and overcoming the impediments to high-risk, high-return science

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Scientific inquiry involves taking risks. Every experiment, every analysis, every collaboration entails embarking on a path whose destination is uncertain and whose terminus could be a dead end. Yet, not all projects are equally risky. In choosing what to work on, scientists have the latitude to embrace or avoid. Appropriately high risk can bring high return, while excessive caution hampers scientific progress. Thus, scientists and the public alike have an interest in encouraging researchers to pursue suitably risky projects, yet investigators often shy away from taking the big risks that may generate the most productive science. This project unpacks the incentives that investigators face when choosing how much risk to take on in their scientific careers. The project illuminates why researchers may shy away from the most promising but risky ideas, and asks how scientific norms and institutions can be modified to motivate researchers to pursue the most promising ideas while still protecting their livelihoods from the vicissitudes of scientific chance. This understanding can help accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, enhancing the public’s return on its investment in scientific research. The researchers develop, analyze, and communicate mathematical models of how scientists balance the competing incentives and constraints that they face when constructing and pursuing their research programs. These models apply the tools of economics and decision theory to the practice of scientific research, and blaze new ground by focusing specifically on scientists’ risk-taking and its consequences for scientific debate and the formation of scientific consensus. One component of the research examines how scientists’ tradition of preferentially publishing successful projects encourages or discourages risk-taking, and how alternative models for scientific publication might shift scientists’ tolerance for risk. A second component builds on recent mathematical developments in the theory of imprecise probability to develop a more expansive view of how scientists navigate the thick uncertainty that defines work at the scientific frontier. The researchers engage closely with funders, research administrators, journal editors and publishers, and other stakeholders to direct the research and share its outcomes, ensuring that the discoveries that the research yields are used to promote high-risk, high-return science. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.