Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in Science
Boudreau, Guinan, Lakhani and Riedl study how evaluators judge frontier scientific research proposals. They argue that the intellectual distance between a proposal and the evaluator's own expertise relates systematically to the scores given. They ran a grant proposal process at a leading research university with evaluators and proposals randomly assigned, producing over two thousand evaluator and proposal pairs. Evaluators give lower scores to proposals closer to their own expertise and to highly novel ones, a pattern consistent with boundedly rational evaluation of new ideas.
Boudreau, Guinan, Lakhani and Riedl study how evaluators judge frontier scientific research proposals. They argue that the intellectual distance between a proposal and the evaluator's own expertise relates systematically to the scores given. They ran a grant proposal process at a leading research university with evaluators and proposals randomly assigned, producing over two thousand evaluator and proposal pairs. Evaluators give lower scores to proposals closer to their own expertise and to highly novel ones, a pattern consistent with boundedly rational evaluation of new ideas.
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Boudreau, K. J., Guinan, E. C., Lakhani, K. R., & Riedl, C. (2016). Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in Science. Management Science, 62(10), 2765-2783. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2285.