AAAS Grants and Prizes

Push or Pull? Grants, Prizes and Information

In the funding of R&D, push mechanisms, such as research grants, subsidize research input, while pull mechanisms, such as innovation prizes, reward research output. By rewarding research output, pull mechanisms create strong incentives for researchers to devote non observable inputs to R&D. Push mechanisms, in contrast, may reward a researcher independently of her output. In the presence of mor...

News, awards and prizes

In a new study published in Cerebral Cortex, Senior Researcher Jens Hjortkjær together with colleagues from the Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance (DRCMR) demonstrated a method to decode listeners’ brain activity patterns to determine what sound source a person is listening to. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record neural activity while participa...

2016 AAAS Fellows approved by the AAAS Council.

Alison L. Van Eenennaam, Univ. of California, Davis Americans, not just Europeans—are empowered to reach their full potential as leaders.” Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, president of Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society, spoke forcefully at WLSTE+10 about the continuing imbalance in women’s access to leadership positions in science, not only in the Middle East but also globally. “All of our socie...

Inducement Prizes and Innovation

We examine the effect of prizes on innovation using data on awards for technological development offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England at annual competitions between 1839 and 1939. We find large effects of the prizes on competitive entry and we also detect an impact of the prizes on the quality of contemporaneous patents, especially when prize categories were set by a strict rota...

Incentives , prizes , and innovation