Desk research I did on funding lotteries in 2023.
Desk research I did on funding lotteries in 2023.
Support for a lottery was higher amongst those that had won funding. Multiple respondents stated that they supported a lottery when ineligible applications had been excluded and outstanding applications funded, so that the remaining applications were truly equal.
Normally, they agree that a certain fraction of applications should be funded, no doubt. For simplicity let’s say we get 100 applications. And let’s say that the committee agrees 10 of them should get funding. The committee also agrees that another, say, 20 percent have a high quality and should be funded, if there were enough funding. But usually, the situation is that there are more fundable projects than there is funding. Then the committee needs to prioritize between these 20 percent, which is what we call the “gray zone.” So in that gray zone, they argue. This is usually where the committee spends most of its time at a funding decision meeting. . . . In that gray zone, we are now making the experiment.
How to rank proposals concretely:
Hi! I found this twitterthread (https://twitter.com/SiccodeKnecht/status/1543856016751828992) that has a list of lottery funders. Apparently NWO has done a lottery at least three times (source: https://twitter.com/ArnoldLubbers1/status/1567771295462424577):
- two rounds at the NRO (task force educational research)
- at the NWA (national science agenda): https://www.originscenter.nl/nl/financing-schemes/#small-projects
- working together with the randomization project of RoRi: https://researchonresearch.org/experimental-funder
So that means that within the domains of NWO they have not done anything with lotteries yet, only within their divisions (https://www.nwo.nl/en/governance-and-organisation) and in collaboration with RoRi. Will ask more tomorrow of course 😊
Some scientists doubt whether NWO is able to make a meaningful distinction between one good proposal and another. They advocate rewarding the very best proposals, filtering out the worst proposals and drawing lots for the rest of the grants. “That stuff about drawing lots… You hear that argument mostly from people who don’t get grants themselves.” It also comes from members of The Young Academy. “Well, it easy for them to say, because they are generally already firmly in the saddle. And they never say, I’ll give my Vidi grant back, just raffle it off. Anyway, everyone is entitled to their opinion.”: https://www.erasmusmagazine.nl/en/2022/05/13/research-councils-boss-marcel-levi-you-could-allocate-the-money-on-the-basis-of-excellence/
Very good source for what the head of NWO thinks.
For attribution, please cite this work as
Olsson-Collentine (2025, April 4). Anton Olsson-Collentine: Funding lotteries. Retrieved from olssoncollentine.com/posts/2025-04-04-funding-lotteries/
BibTeX citation
@misc{olsson-collentine2025funding,
author = {Olsson-Collentine, Anton},
title = {Anton Olsson-Collentine: Funding lotteries},
url = {olssoncollentine.com/posts/2025-04-04-funding-lotteries/},
year = {2025}
}