Exploring the effect of overlapping institutional applications on panel decision-making

The assessing of a pool of competing projects is a challenging task for scientific panels at funding agencies. Using a large-scale and rich data from a broad set of panels from the UK’s largest research council, we explore whether scientific panels treat overlapping applications from the same institution in a selection round differently. Building on previous research that suggested that panels may favour institutional diversity in funding outcomes, we find that applications at the margin of the funding decision are less likely to be funded when an application from the same institution is also funded. However, we find little evidence of welfare losses associated with this outcome. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of panels in shaping of scientific funding are also examined.