A signalling game for research fund allocation in Thailand

Abstract

This study proposed a signalling game for a research grant allocation situation involving two players: a funding agency and a researcher whose type was kept secret from the funding agency, where the agency decided the grant amount to fund the researcher. The results showed that a pooling equilibrium existed when the difference between a large and small fund was sufficiently large, and the expected costs of failing the large-fund project for both types were small, whereas the expected costs of failing the small-fund project for both types were large. A case study was examined based on the research impact assessment of other studies. According to the results, we were still in a pooling equilibrium. However, if some model parameters changed (such as when the estimated cost of a penalty to a bad researcher was increased), a separating equilibrium began to show.