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The National Science Foundation (NSF) will be experimenting with a newdistributed approach to reviewing proposals, whereby a group of principalinvestigators (PIs) or proposers in a subfield act as reviewers for theproposals submitted by the same set of PIs. To encourage honesty, PIs' chancesfor getting funded are tied to the quality of their reviews (with respect tothe reviews provided by the entire group), in addition to the quality of theirproposals. Intuitively, this approach can more fairly distribute the reviewworkload, discourage frivolous proposal submission, and encourage high qualityreviews. On the other hand, this method has already raised concerns about theintegrity of the process and the possibility of strategic manipulation. In thispaper, we take a closer look at three specific issues in an attempt to gain abetter understanding of the strengths and limitations of the new process beyondfirst impressions and anecdotal evidence. We start by considering the benefitsand drawbacks of bundling the quality of PIs' reviews with the scientific meritof their proposals. We then consider the issue of collusion and favoritism.Finally, we examine whether the new process puts controversial proposals at adisadvantage. We conclude that some benefits of using review quality as anincentive mechanism may outweigh its drawbacks. On the other hand, even acoalition of two PIs can cause significant harm to the process, as the built-inincentives are not strong enough to deter collusion. While we also confirm thecommon suspicion that the process is skewed toward non-controversial proposals,the more unexpected finding is that among equally controversial proposals,those of lower quality get a leg up through this process. Thus the process notonly favors non-controversial proposals, but in some sense, mediocrity. We alsodiscuss possible ways to improve this review process.

Incentives, Quality, and Risks: A Look Into the NSF Proposal Review Pilot