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

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 incentives to motivate effort clash with incentives to motivate risk-taking, because a failed project may be evidence of a risky undertaking but could also be the result of simple sloth. As a result, the incentives needed to encourage effort actively discourage risk-taking. Scientists respond by working on safe projects that generate evidence of effort but that don’t move science forward as rapidly as riskier projects would. A social planner who prizes scientific productivity above researchers’ well-being could remedy the problem by rewarding major discoveries richly enough to induce high-risk research, but in doing so would expose scientists to a degree of livelihood risk that ultimately leaves them worse off. Because the scientific community is approximately self-governing and constructs its own reward schedule, the incentives that researchers are willing to impose on themselves are inadequate to motivate the scientific risks that would best expedite scientific progress.Scientific research requires taking risks, so why does much funded scientific research play it safe? This study uses an economic contracting model to argue that this can be explained in part by the non-observability of scientists’ effort and their risk-taking, coupled with the self-organized nature of science.