Quadratic funding of public goods assigns resources efficiently when the public can accurately assess the value of prospective public goods. But in its early stages, a research program’s value is often not obvious to a wide audience (or even to the investigator). This is already a problem in scientific funding: philanthropic and governmental program officers often struggle to understand the value of especially original research—and that’s their full-time job! Perhaps there are some visionary believers in the crowd, but on the whole, asking the crowd seems likely to exacerbate the issue, and to lead to chronic under-funding.
One way to solve this problem might be to use Quadratic voting to assess the investigator rather than the project, then to assign long-term, investigator-aligned funds, akin to HHMI’s Investigator: Fund people, not projects.
This is one answer to To what extent can quadratic funding provision tools for thought?.
Q. Why might quadratic funding models chronically underfund original, early stage research?
A. The crowd will generally struggle to assess the value of such research.