Do grant proposal texts matter for funding decisions? A field experiment

• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04968-7
• Müge Simsek, Mathijs de Vaan & Arnout van de Rijt

We report on a field experiment conducted by The Dutch Research Council (NWO) in collaboration with the authors in an early-career competition for awards of 800,000 euros of research funding. A random half of panelists were shown a CV and only a one-paragraph summary of the proposed research, while the other half were shown a CV and a full proposal. We find that withholding proposal texts from panelists did not detectibly impact their proposal rankings.

How about the promotional language paper by Hao Peng and Brian Uzzi?