The impact of a few: The effect of alternative formulas for recruiting talent in a non-competitive system

The introduction of performance-based university research funding systems (hereafter PRFS) has widely spread and established in many countries since the 1980s. Such systems have been developed in order to allocate funds at the institutional level, leading to differences between academic institutions and a concentration of talent in those which rank higher in this evaluation benchmarks. Good examples are the Research Evaluation Framework (former Research Assessment Exercises) in the United Kingdom (Martin, 2011), or the Australian Excellence in Research Initiative (Butler, 2003). A recent review on the characteristics of PRFS and their advantages and limitations is offered by Hicks (2012). But other countries have adopted another approach, focusing on individual incentives rather than institutional evaluation. The reason for doing so is that differences between universities are not as significant as differences between individuals within universities (Abramo, Cicero & D'Angelo, 2011).