A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement models the page limit on a research grant application as a cap on bids, and finds that a short form behaves as a raffle that charges for its tickets.
A theory note treats the length of a grant application as a bid, and the page limit on the form as a cap on it
A grant application form with a page limit on it is, on the account given in a new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement, a raffle that sells its tickets by the page. Page Limits as Bid Caps: Proposal length in research funding contests, by Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory, and Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, arrives at that view by proof.
The paper brings contest theory, scheme design and applicant effort into a single model of two applicants and one award. Where the limit is short enough to hold both applicants to it, both write exactly that much and the award falls to a coin toss between them. Within a band of such limits the two together write more pages than they would have written with no limit. A draw that asks for no pages does better than every limit in that range, and better than the open contest whenever the weaker project is worth more than a third of the stronger.
We are grateful to every colleague who has ever written precisely to the limit. The model would be poorer without them, and so, we have come to think, would the limit.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
The University counts it a mark of a settled research culture that a school can examine the arrangements under which research is proposed and come back with something a committee could hold in one hand. Dr Vandermeer said the authors had “kept the paper to seven pages, and would not wish anything read into that”.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6uqjbv.