- (1) Universities in Australian (and around the Western OECD academic world) face a dynamic set of imperative strategic changes, especially post pandemic research funding models which are provided by tax-payer funded ARC grants.
- (2) Universities are faced with an economic obligation to demonstrate their value to a democratic market economy, beyond perceived "academic authority". Tax-payer funded research programmes are increasingly limited and require well-grounded evidence to assure continued funding has real-world value.
- (3) In economic terms, research-intensive Universities, must align with OECD established norms to provide "market value" which justifies University funded resources as tax-payer investmented products.
- (4) Key questions to be answered using Elinor Ostrom's game-theory experimental approach include: (a) What value do research academics prescribe to their work? (b) How do we value the research products they produce for both scholarly and public consumption; and (c) Why should researchers act collectively to allocate resources to demonstrate tax-payer value?
(1) Reproduce and adapt the orignal game-theoretic economic experiments by Ostrom et al to evaluate government funding (ARC grants) as "marketplaces". Beahvioural economic experiments provide a framework to quantitatively (and qualitatively) measure the efficiency of group behaviours within "marketplaces". For example a traditional marketplace has goods for sale and prices set for the exchange of those goods (known as "one shot" marketplaces), for example Amazon online store demonstrates a "one-shot" marketplace. Scholarly products and assets are not as easily defined or traded as commodities within traditional economics, however economics in recent years has started to define other types of marketplaces which are quantifiable. Most notably the work of Elinor Ostrom and other "game-theory" researchers have won Noble prizes for these alternative market models.
(2) The proposed research will experiment with groups of researchers in a game setting, whereby participants will place bids wtihin a marketplace exchanging resources for ARC grant funding opportunities. The outcomes will be analysed by a marketplace-type, known as an asymetric payoff table. This type of economic game provides insights into how groups act collaboratively to achieve optimal outcomes, as defined by mathematcial efficiency measurements.
- How do researchers engage as a group to manage their access to common pool resource marketplaces, such as grant funding.
- Hypothesis: The results of this reproduced experiment will be evaluated against the original experiment's hypothesis. Researchers will act in groups to prioritise:
- (a) personal identiy layers as value generation,
- (b) group-context layers for product value generation, and/or
- (c) material pay-off for individual and/or group context value generation.