A grant lottery

Seems like a clear case of "let's try it and see" to me.

Implicit in this proposal is the idea that it isn’t possible to rank applications reliably. If a lottery approach meant we ended up funding weak research and denying funds to excellent project, this would clearly be a bad thing. But research rankings by committee and/or peer review is notoriously unreliable, and it is hard to compare proposals that span a range of disciplines. Many people feel that funding is already a lottery, albeit an unintentional one, because the same grant that succeeds in one round may be rejected in the next. Interviews are problematic because they mean that a major decision – fund or not – is decided on the basis of a short sample of a candidate’s behaviour, and that people with great proposals but poor social skills may be turned down in favour of glib individuals who can sell themselves more effectively.

My view is that there are advantages for the lottery approach over and above the resource issues. First, Avin’s analysis concludes that reliance on peer review leads to a bias against risk-taking, which can mean that novelty and creativity are discouraged. Second, once a proposal was in the pool, there would be no scope for bias against researchers in terms of gender or race – something that can be a particular concern when interviews are used to assess. Third, the impact on the science community is also worth considering. Far less grief would be engendered by a grant rejection if you knew it was that you were unlucky, rather than that you were judged to be wanting. Furthermore, as noted by Marina Papoutsi, some institutions evaluate their staff in terms of how much grant income they bring in – a process that ignores the strong element of chance that already affects funding decisions. A lottery approach, where the randomness is explicit, would put paid to such practices.

http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2018/04/should-research-funding-be-allocated-at.html