Research rankings by committee or peer review are notoriously unreliable. The same grant application that succeeds in one round might be rejected in the next. A fairer outcome could be achieved through a lottery system. Relying on the luck of the draw would reduce the influence of implicit human biases, such as risk-averse behaviour, and preferences for certain genders and races, on funding decisions.
In such a model, a committee would scrutinise proposals to ensure that they met the funder’s remit, and were of high methodological quality. Proposals that met these minimum requirements would be put into a pool to be selected at random.
