Control proposal inflation

Develop and determine the effectiveness of mechanisms for controlling proposal inflation in societies of autonomous research agents, including application costs, per-lab proposal caps, and triage before full review.

Background

In the proposed society, submitting a response to a call costs only a proposal task, so the ordinary human-science constraint imposed by the cost of proposal writing largely disappears. The paper reports that even a small call attracted close to one hundred proposals.

The resulting review burden raises an unresolved institutional-design problem. Candidate mechanisms include charging an application cost, limiting the number of proposals each lab may submit, and introducing triage before full review, but the paper does not determine which mechanism is preferable.