CASH FOR ANSWERS
2008-05-09
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| ANSWERS,创意 |
CASH FOR ANSWERS
重赏之下必有创意
By Tim Harford
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
In 1737, John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire, stunned London's scientific establishment by presenting an idiosyncratic solution to the most important and notorious technological problem of the 18th century. He was hoping to win a then-fabulous prize of £20,000 (about £5m today) for anyone who could devise a way for a ship's navigator to determine its longitude and therefore its position at sea. Harrison's approach was to build a clock that would keep Greenwich time faithfully; by comparing local time (measured using the position of the sun) with the time in London, the navigator would know how far east or west the ship had sailed. The theory was sound, but given the rolling of ships and changing temperature and humidity, the leading scientists of the day – including Sir Isaac Newton – reckoned that a sufficiently accurate clock would be impossible to build. Harrison proved otherwise.
The longitude prize, sponsored by the British government, was not unique. Prizes were also offered in France for a functional water turbine, and for a method of preserving food for Napoleon's armies. The latter prize quickly inspired the tin can, more of a blessing than food snobs might acknowledge.
But such prizes then fell out of fashion. For commercial innovations, we now rely on patents to encourage and protect innovators. Basic research is funded not by prizes but by grants.
And yet two centuries after tinned fish hit the market, the way we look for solutions has come full circle. Governments, private foundations and even corporations are rediscovering the value of offering prizes for good ideas. Rather than paying for scientific and engineering effort as they have done for the past 200 years, idea-hungry patrons are returning to the 18th century, and paying for results.
The most famous innovation prize of this century, the m Ansari X Prize, was designed to promote private space flight. The pot went to Mojave Aerospace Ventures in 2004, after the successful flights of SpaceShipOne. And even the Ansari X Prize is dwarfed by a quasi-prize of up to .5bn that is about to be offered by five national governments and the Gates Foundation to the developers and suppliers of a more effective vaccine against pneumococcal diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis and bronchitis. The prize, called an “advanced market commitment'' or “advanced purchase commitment'', takes the form of an agreement to subsidise heavily the first big orders of a successful vaccine. Given that the top companies in the UK's powerful pharmaceutical industry spent little more than £5bn in 2006 on research and development, a .5bn prize should be taken seriously on hard-nosed commercial grounds alone.
And if formidable obstacles to setting the prize conditions can be overcome, the pneumococcal diseases contest could be followed by a malaria vaccine prize twice as big and an Aids vaccine prize that would be bigger still.
Prizes need not have such lofty ambitions. They can simply be a way of turning a solution into a commodity. One company, Innocentive, provides an exchange where “seekers'' can offer cash to “solvers''. Both sides are anonymous, which is one of the selling points of innovation prizes: they reward neither connections nor seniority, but solutions alone. Innocentive's problems read a little like the small ads on the world's least romantic lonely-hearts website. “A technology is desired that produces a pleasant scent upon stretching of an elastomer film'' (,000). “Surface chemistry for optical biosensor with high binding capacity and specificity is required'' (,000).
Netflix, a film rental website which offers recommendations based on what you looked at, bought, rented or reviewed in previous visits, has skipped middlemen like Innocentive. In March 2006, the chief executive of Netflix, Reed Hastings, met some colleagues to discuss how they might improve the recommendation system, Cinematch. Hastings, inspired by the story of John Harrison, suggested offering a prize of m to anyone who could do better.
The Netflix prize, announced in October 2006, struck a chord with the Web 2.0 generation. Within days of the prize announcement, some of the best minds in the relevant fields of computer science were on the case. Within a year, the leading entries had reduced Cinematch's recommendation errors by more than 8 per cent – close to the million-dollar hurdle of 10 per cent. And it has cost Netflix very little to mobilise all this effort. The company has had to pay out a mere ,000 progress award, to a team of three AT&T data analysts.
Even Netflix is surprised at how well it's been going. “We just didn't think the relevant research community was so big,'' says Steve Swasey, vice-president.
More than 2,500 teams from 161 countries and comprising 27,000 competitors have entered the contest. Teams from California, Budapest and Toronto have been battling away at the top. Clearly, the million-dollar prize has mobilised far more than a million dollars worth of research effort.
The Netflix prize has been helped by the ease of transmitting data around the world and the affordability of the computing power necessary to have a go. The fun of the challenge alone is one of the biggest attractions to participants. So, too, is access to Netflix's huge database of recommendations – a dream for statisticians and computer scientists. And the competition has also been fanned by the fact that all improvements are incremental and the company is able to publish listings of the current leaders, meaning the race is verging on a spectator sport.
The X Prize and Netflix prize have managed to generate a tremendous amount of interest. That means more than free publicity for the organisers; it also means that the prize catalyses far more effort than one might expect on cold financial grounds. “One of the goals of the prize is to transform the way people think,'' says Bob Weiss, vice-chairman of the X Prize Foundation. “We were trying to create a sea-change.''
Weiss says that the founders of the X Prize foundation wanted to revive their childhood dreams of a day when ordinary people would be able to travel into space – expectations formed in the heady 1950s and 1960s. They may get their wish. To Weiss's delight, Virgin Galactic claims it will soon be in a position to offer private space flights. It will be using the technology that won the X Prize.
Future X Prizes, each one funded by corporate sponsors and philanthropic donors, aim to kick-start other new industries. The Archon X Prize for genomics will be awarded to the team that can sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days, at a cost of ,000 per genome. That is unimaginably quicker and cheaper than the first private genomic sequencing in 2000, which, according to the X Prize foundation, took nine months and cost 0m for a single human genome. (Craig Venter, the director of that effort, is one of the backers of the new prize.) It is the kind of leap forward that would be necessary to usher in an era of personalised medicine, in which doctors could prescribe drugs and give advice in full knowledge of each patient's genetic susceptibilities.
Another prize will be awarded to the manufacturer of a popular mass-production car that has a fuel efficiency of 100 miles per gallon. The model is the same each time. The X Prize foundation identifies a goal and finds sponsors; it announces a prize and whips up the maximum possible enthusiasm, with the aim of generating far more investment than the prize itself; the prize achieved, it hands out the award with great fanfare and moves on to set other challenges. The prize winner is left with intellectual property intact, and may capitalise on the commercial value of that intellectual property, if any commercial value exists.
(to be continued)
The X Prize foundation claims that the Ansari X Prize directly stimulated 0m of spending on research and development, 10 times the value of the prize itself. That is clever, and for a handful of sexy challenges it is likely to be a trick that can be repeated.
But the X Prize and the Netflix prize may give too flattering a picture of what might be possible if prizes catch on. Rather, prizes could become humdrum. For the problems listed on Innocentive's website – “The challenge is to produce a specific citric acid ester in a faster cycle under current specifications'' (,000) – the day of the humdrum has already arrived.
In other cases, for example the advanced market commitment for a pneumococcal virus, the sums of money being invested in the research are so huge already that it is hard to imagine the mere glamour of the .5bn “prize'' weighing heavily on the minds of scientists and inventors.
For both the uninspiring innovation and the billion-dollar research programme, it is the prize money itself that has to do the talking. If that is not the case, the prizes will not multiply research efforts, as the Ansari X Prize and the Netflix prize have done, but will increasingly need to compete with alternative methods of funding innovation – that is, grants and patents – on a level playing field. To become a significant alternative to grants and patents, prizes will have to become very large indeed – large enough to cover, on average, all of the likely research expenditures of all those hoping to win. Is that desirable?
Champions of prizes see them as a component of a wider system to promote innovation, rather than as an outright replacement either for grants or patents. Instead, the hope is that prizes will help to compensate for the specific weaknesses of those alternatives.
The downside of a patent is fundamental to its design: in order to reward an innovator, the patent confers a monopoly. Economists view this as, at best, a necessary evil since monopolies distort prices. In the hope of raising profits from some customers, they will price others out of a market. The most obvious victims are consumers in poor countries.
In an ideal world, prizes could replace patents. Instead of offering a patent for an innovation, the government could offer a prize. The inventor would pocket the prize but would not be allowed to exploit any monopoly power, so the innovation would be freely available to use in products for poor consumers – cheap drugs for Africa, for instance – and, importantly, in further innovations. But to explain that idea is to see its limitations. How could the government know enough about the costs and benefits – and even the very possibility – of an innovation to put a price tag on it and write the terms of reference for a prize competition? For this reason it is hard to see prizes replacing patents in most cases. But it is not impossible.
The modern heir to 18th-century prizes for canning, water turbines and finding longitude at sea is the advanced market commitment for vaccines for the poor: the goal is clear, the costs and benefits can be guessed at, and the quasi-prize nudges the patent system to one side with a prize contract that respects the patent but, in exchange for a large subsidy, radically constricts the holder's right to exploit it.
Prizes can also, in principle, supplement grants for basic research, paying scientists for results as well as for effort. There is, for example, an “Mprize'' for creating long-lived mice. The eventual aim is to lengthen human life spans. And the Clay Mathematics Institute, a non-profit body set up 10 years ago by a Boston businessman, is offering million-dollar prizes for the solution of seven “Millennium'' problems in mathematics.
These prizes are exceptions; but prizes were once the standard way of encouraging basic research. According to Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, more than twice as many 18th-century scientific societies paid for results using prizes or medals than paid for effort with grants. As that changed, scientific societies sometimes ignored the wishes of donors, or even had the wills of deceased donors voided, in order to hand out grants rather than the prizes specified.
The standard historian's explanation of this trend is that once science became a profession rather than the province of rich amateurs, prizes were no longer a suitable way of funding innovation. Hanson is not convinced. “Most academics who study the issue of prizes have focused on what a prize does to the behaviour of researchers, versus a grant,'' he says. “But there's another aspect: what does the person giving the prize or the grant get out of it?''
He argues that grants are more appealing than prizes to bureaucracies for many reasons, not all admirable: “With grants, there's all sorts of possible patronage and corruption.'' Even leaving aside outright graft, there is plenty of opportunity for cosiness and cliques. Then there is the mundane fact that grants are easier to account for in an annual budget than a multi-million prize that could be paid tomorrow, in a year, or never. For Hanson, it was for these reasons, rather than any intrinsic merits, that grants elbowed aside prizes in the 19th century.
Prizes may be making a comeback because of all the money now available from private foundations – which demand results. Not only the X Prizes and the Millennium problems prize, but even the pneumococcal vaccine prize is part-funded by private money. Yet governments are getting in on the act. The US space and defence research agencies Nasa and Darpa both use innovation prizes, and other government agencies look likely to follow with, for example, an “H prize'' for advances in hydrogen fuel technology.
If Hanson is right, this new trend is a welcome swing of the pendulum towards a modest use of prizes. But not everyone is convinced that prizes will live up to the hype.
“The literature has pushed them as a silver bullet; more recently there's been a bit more sobriety in the debate,'' warns Andrew Farlow, an expert in the economics of vaccines at Oxford University. “How much genuine risk-taking can it pull along?''
The problem is not the principle, he argues, but the details. A vaccine for HIV is a distant and costly prospect, and might require a bn or bn prize. Inevitably, companies and their shareholders will question whether the prize would be honoured in full. The triggers for releasing some of the prize money are difficult to define: early vaccines would probably be expensive, fallible and risky, but better than nothing. Donors would not want all the money to go to those efforts and leave none to encourage superior successors. Try framing “good enough'' in legalese, when billions are at stake.
Donors might pay a lot more than they needed to for a substandard product, or the prize might be too restrictive and too small to generate any interest at all. That would drain attention, enthusiasm and political will. “It all sounds like good economics, but whether you could ever set a prize big enough or correct enough to work in those cases is doubtful,'' Farlow concludes.
But the proponents of advanced market commitments (AMCs) believe the problems can be overcome. “There's no question that there's going to be a way to deal with these challenges in a sensible, analytically based way,'' argues Ruth Levine, vice-president of the Center for Global Development, a think-tank based in Washington, DC, which has been a leading force in evaluating and advocating AMCs. “By that I mean that a proposal or contract will be written that makes sense and is based on good empirical work.''
The pilot is the pneumococcal vaccine pledge, made in principle back in February 2007, and now being hammered out. It is a big deal – a lot of money is on the table, with the potential to save many millions of lives at a low cost. Yet compared with other possible AMCs, the pneumococcal problem is relatively simple: two credible vaccines are in the late stages of development. Levine acknowledges that this example is as close to a procurement contract as to a pure innovation prize, but believes there is much to be learned from the exercise about whether donors can make a commitment together and handle the legal and accounting challenges. “What this won't be is a pure test of whether putting a market-like offer out a long distance into the future will give firms an incentive to do early-stage R&D,'' she says.
That is the dream of AMC proponents, but the true test – a malaria or HIV prize – is some way off yet. Only then will we see whether private companies will take the bait, and the public purse will get value for money. We can be sure that big Pharma will be checking the small print: John Harrison, master clockmaker, was eventually rewarded for his brilliant, accurate maritime clock only by appealing direct to King George III. Neither he nor anyone else was ever judged to have satisfied the conditions necessary to receive the longitude prize.
重赏之下必有创意（上）
作者：英国《金融时报》专栏作家提姆·哈福德(Tim Harford)
2008年5月7日 星期三
1737年，自学成才的英国约克郡钟表匠约翰•哈里森(John Harrison)震惊了伦敦科学界。他提出的特别方案，解决了18世纪最重要也是最著名的技术难题。哈里森提出这个方案，是为了赢取一笔2万英镑的巨额奖金（约合今天的500万英镑）：任何人只要能设计出一种办法，让领航员能够明确船舶的经度，进而确定其在海上的位置，就能拿到这笔奖金。哈里森的办法是先安装一只严格遵守格林尼治时间的钟表，然后根据太阳的位置来确定当地时间。领航员只要将当地时间与伦敦时间进行比较，就可以知道船舶向东或向西航行了多远。这在理论上是可行的，但考虑到船舶的摆动及温湿度的变化，当时一些顶尖的科学家（包括艾萨克•牛顿爵士(Sir Issac Newton)）都认为：根本造不出足够精确的钟表。但哈里森证明了事实并非如此。
英国政府赞助的这项“经度大奖”在当时并非独此一家。法国也曾张榜悬赏，希望征求到实用的水力涡轮机和为拿破仑军队储存食物的方法。后一个奖项很快便催生出听装罐头，它带来的好处比食品界那些假内行所认可的更多。
但此后，这种奖赏日渐衰落。对于商业创新，我们现在依靠专利来鼓励和保护创新者。基础研究的资金来源不再是奖金，而是拨款。
重启18世纪做法：为结果付费
不过，在鱼罐头问世两个世纪后，我们寻找解决方案的办法又绕了回来。政府、私人基金乃至企业都再次认识到悬赏征求好创意的价值所在。渴求创意的赞助人不再像过去200年那样为科学和工程研究活动付费，而是重新采用了18世纪的做法：为结果付费。
本世纪最知名的创新奖是奖金高达1000万美元的安萨里X奖(Ansari X Prize)，目的是推动个人航天飞行计划。2004年，“太空船一号”(SpaceShipOne)的成功飞行，让莫哈维航空航天公司(Mojave Aerospace Ventures)赢得了这笔巨奖。但是，五国政府与盖茨基金会(Gates Foundation)即将联合推出的一项准奖金计划，将让安萨里X奖相形见绌。这笔高达15亿美元的奖金将授予能更有效抗击肺炎、脑膜炎和支气管炎等肺炎球菌疾病的疫苗的开发者和供应商。这个奖项名为“发达市场承诺”或“发达购买承诺”，将以协议的形式给成功疫苗的第一笔大额订单提供巨额补贴。鉴于英国强大制药行业顶尖级企业2006年的研发费用只不过略高于50亿英镑，仅从讲求实际的商业角度来看，15亿美元的奖项都应该受到认真对待。
如果设立奖金领取条件的巨大障碍能够得以克服，那么在这场肺炎球菌疾病竞赛后，还会有双倍奖金额度的疟疾疫苗金，乃至额度更大的艾滋病疫苗奖。
设立的奖项未必都要有如此崇高的目标。它们也可以只是一种将方案转化为商品的办法。在一家名为Innocentive的公司提供的交换平台上，“征询者”可以悬赏征求“答疑者”。交换双方都是匿名的，这正是创新奖的卖点之一：奖赏的对象不是关系或资格的深浅，而只是解决问题的办法。Innocentive上面的种种问题，读起来有点像世界上最不浪漫的网上单身俱乐部的分类广告：“一种能在人造橡胶薄膜拉伸时产生愉悦香味的技术”（奖金5万美元）。“能够用于光学生化传感器的表面化学技术，需要具备高度的附着能力和特异性”（奖金6万美元）。
网络时代的集思广益
Netflix是一个电影出租网站, 根据你在历次访问中察看、购买、租借或评论的影片提供推荐。Netflix的做法越过了Innocentive等中间商环节。2006年3月，Netflix首席执行官里德•赫斯廷斯(Reed Hastings)与一些同事开会讨论如何才能改善推荐系统Cinematch。在约翰•哈里森故事的启发下，赫斯廷斯建议向任何能够做得更好的人提供100万美元的奖赏。
2006年10月宣布的Netflix奖在Web 2.0一代人中引起了共鸣。奖项宣布后短短几天，就有一些计算机科学相关领域最有见地的人加入了研究。不到一年，Cinematch主要条目中的推荐错误就减少了8%，接近百万大奖设定的错误率减少10%的目标。此项行动的动员费用相当之少。到目前为止，Netflix只需向由3位美国电话电报公司(AT&T)数据分析师组成的团队支付5万美元的进步奖。
就连Netflix也对进展如此顺利感到惊讶。公司副总裁史蒂夫•斯韦奇(Steve Swasey)表示：“我们根本没想到相关研究群体会如此庞大。”
来自161个国家2500多个团队加入了这场竞争，参赛者达到2.7万人，其中来自加利福尼亚、布达佩斯和多伦多的团队一路领先。显然，这项百万美元奖金动员的力量远远超出了等值研究计划。
Netflix奖金计划，得益于全球数据传播的便利，以及启动计划所需电脑人力资源的供应程度。对于参赛者而言，仅是迎接挑战的乐趣本身就足以构成最大吸引力。同样，访问Netflix庞大的推荐数据库，也是数据学家和计算机科学家们梦寐以求的事情。推动竞争的另一个因素是：所有改良方案都是递进的，该公司可以公布当前领先者的名录，这意味着此类竞赛正逐渐体现出观赏体育的色彩。
X奖和Netflix奖成功激发了人们极大的兴趣。这不仅意味着组织者能够获得免费宣传，还意味着这类奖项催生出的研究活动，远远多于从纯金融角度出发可能取得的结果。X奖基金会(X Prize Foundation)副主席鲍伯•韦斯(Bob Weiss)表示：“设立奖项的目标之一是改变人们的思维方式。我们希望促成根本的转变。”
悬赏实现童年梦想
韦斯表示，X奖基金会的创始人想要重现儿时的梦想，即有朝一日普通人也能登上太空——这是上世纪五六十年代狂热时期人们的期望。他们也许能梦想成真。让韦斯高兴的是，维珍银河(Virgin Galactic)宣称很快就能提供个人太空旅行服务。它将要采用赢得安萨里X奖的那种技术。
未来的各种X奖将由企业赞助者或慈善捐赠者提供资金，目标是快速启动其他新兴产业。基因学的阿康X奖(Archon X Prize)将授予能在10天内给100个人类基因组排序的团队，每个基因组的排序费用为1万美元。X奖基金会称，2000年首次私人组织的基因排序活动历时9 个月，仅是花费在单个人类基因组上的资金就达到了1亿美元。（这项行动的负责人克雷格•文特(Craig Venter)就是新奖项的支持者之一）。相比之下，本次排序活动的速度之快、费用之省，出乎人们的想象。这是一次必要的飞跃，可以引领我们进入到个性化医药的新纪元。在这个时代，医生们可以在全面了解每个患者基因敏感性的情况下开具药方，提供建议。
另一个奖项将授予油耗为每加仑100英里的大众化量产汽车的制造商。这类奖项的运作模式每次都是一样的：X奖基金会先确立一项目标并找到赞助者，然后宣布奖项并激发起尽可能大的热情，目标是促成比奖金本身规模更大的投资。一旦有人获奖，基金会将会大张旗鼓地颁奖，然后继续发起新的挑战。获奖者将完整保留知识产权，而且可以在该知识产权存在商业价值的情况下，将商业价值转化为资本。
（待续）
译者/李晖
阅读本文章英文,请点击 CASH FOR ANSWERS
重赏之下必有创意（下）
作者：英国《金融时报》专栏作家提姆·哈福德(Tim Harford)
2008年5月8日 星期四
X奖基金会宣称，安萨里X奖直接激发了1亿美元的研发支出，是奖金自身价值的10倍。这是个聪明的做法。对于许多诱人的挑战而言，这是个可以一再重复的招数。
但是，对于悬赏方式流行起来之后可能出现的结果，X奖和Netflix奖也许提供了一幅过于乐观的画面。其实，悬赏可能会变得乏味。对于Innocentive网址上列出的问题——“挑战内容：按现有规格以更短的周期制作一种特定的柠檬酸酯”（奖金4万美元）——乏味的时刻已经来临。
在其他情况下，例如关于肺炎球菌病毒的“发达市场承诺”，投入研究的资金数额已经如此庞大，因此很难想象，仅凭15亿美元“奖金”的魅力，能在科学家和发明者的心目产生多少份量？
奖金本身要起到鼓励作用
不管是平淡乏味的创新，还是数十亿美元的研究项目，奖金本身要起到鼓励作用。如果不是这样的话，这些奖项就不会像安萨里X奖和Netflix奖那样带来数倍的研究投入，而是会愈发需要与其他赞助创新的方式——即拨款和专利——平等竞争。要成为拨款和专利之外的重要赞助方式，奖金的金额需要变得十分庞大，其水平平均而言足以覆盖所有希望获奖者的全部可能研究费用。这是大家想要的结果吗？
奖金得主们认为，这些奖项是更广泛的创新促进体系的组成部分，而不是要完全取代拨款或专利。相反，人们希望，这些奖项能有助于弥补其他方式特有的不足。
专利的缺陷来自于它的设计：为了奖励创新者，专利带有垄断的特征。经济学家认为，由于垄断会扭曲价格，专利最好也只能算是一种“必要的罪恶”。为了从一些客户那里赚取利润，专利会把他人拦在市场外。最显而易见的受害者就是穷国的消费者。
在理想的世界里，奖项可以取代专利。政府可以向创新颁发奖金，而不必授予专利。发明者可以把奖金装入腰包，却不允许使用任何垄断权，因此，创新成果可以免费使用在提供给贫穷消费者的产品中（例如，提供给非洲的廉价药物），而且重要的是，还可以用于进一步的创新。但要解释这个观念，就要看到它的局限。政府怎么可能全面了解创新的成本和收益，乃至创新实现的可能性，从而给它贴上价签，注明有奖竞争的权限？由于这个原因，奖项在大多数情况下难以取代专利。不过也并非毫无可能。
18世纪悬赏的现代继承者
18世纪的罐装食品、水力涡轮机和确定海上经度等奖项，在现代社会自有其继承者，那就是为贫困者提供疫苗的“发达市场承诺”：这个承诺目标明确，相关成本与收益可以估算。它带有准奖金的性质，通过获奖合同将专利体系推到了一旁。这份合同既尊重专利，又为专利持有者获得大笔补贴设置了条件，严格限制了持有者使用专利的权利。
原则上讲，奖金也可以是基础研究拨款的补充，让科学家的努力和成果都能得到回报。例如，有一种专为培育长寿命白鼠而设立的“M奖”(Mprize)，其最终目标是延长人类寿命。波士顿一位商人10年前设立的克雷数学研究所(Clay Mathematics Institute)是一家非盈利机构，它设立了上百万美元的奖项，征求7个“千禧年”数学问题的答案。
这些奖属于特例，但奖金确实曾是鼓励基础研究的标准做法。乔治•梅森大学(George Mason University)经济学家罗宾•汉森(Robin Hanson)的研究发现，在18世纪，以奖金或奖章回报研究成果的科学团体的数量，是用拨款回报研究活动的科学团体的两倍还多。当这种模式发生变化后，为了分发拨款，而不是拿出指定的奖金，科学团体有时会忽视捐赠者的愿望，甚至会让已故捐赠者的遗嘱作废。
历史学家对这个趋势的标准解释是：一旦科学成为一种职业，而不再是富有的业余爱好者的领地，奖金也就不再是赞助创新的合适方式。汉森对此不敢苟同：“多数研究奖金问题的学者都把注意力放在了奖金和拨款对研究者行为的不同影响上，但事情还有另外一个方面：提供奖金或拨款的人能从中得到什么？”
有拨款，就有腐败机会
汉森提出，对于官僚机构来说，拨款比奖金更具吸引力，这里面有多种原因，而且并不是每个原因都能让人赞赏：“有了拨款，就会有各种可能的庇护关系和腐败行为。”就算没有公然渎职，也有大量捞油水和结党营私的机会。另外还有一个简单的事实：在年度预算中，拨款比数百万美元的奖金更容易做账，因为这笔奖金也许明天就可以兑现，也许需要一年，甚至可能永远无法兑现。对于汉森来说，正是这些原因使拨款在19世纪取代了奖金，而不是因为拨款有什么内在优点。
由于讲求结果的私人基金会提供了大量资金，奖金形式如今可能正在卷土重来。不只是X奖和千禧年数学问题奖，就连肺炎球菌病毒疫苗奖也有一部分资金是由私人资本提供的。各国政府也在纷纷介入。美国航天与国防研究机构美国国家航空航天局(NASA)和国防部高级研究计划局(DARPA)都在运用创新奖。其他政府机构看来也会效仿，例如，奖励氢燃料技术进步的“H奖金”。
如果汉森的见解是正确的，这个新趋势就是一种可喜的变化，显示钟摆正向谨慎使用奖金的这一端摆动。但并不是每个人都确信奖金这种形式能够大加推广。
牛津大学(Oxford University)疫苗产业研究专家安德鲁•法洛(Andrew Farlow)警告称：“各种文献将奖金推崇为万能灵药，直到最近，对这个问题的辩论才多少严肃了一点。想想这会带来多少真正的风险？”
问题在于细节
法洛提出，问题不在于原则，而在于细节。艾滋病疫苗是一个耗资不菲的遥远前景，可能需要设立一个奖金高达100亿或200亿美元的奖项。公司及股东必然会质疑，这个奖金是否会全额兑现？而兑现部分奖金的触发机制也难以定义：早期的疫苗很可能比较昂贵、容易出错并且伴有风险，但它总比没有要好。捐赠者也不会想看到全部资金都投入这些研究活动，却没有余钱来鼓励那些卓越的后继者。在事关数十亿美元的情况下，什么才是“足够好”，你倒是用法律术语去界定一下！
捐赠者可能会为一件接近标准的产品支付不必要的巨额资金，又或者，可能颁奖条件过于严格，奖金数额太小，不足以引起任何人的兴趣。在这种情况下，所有的关注、热情和政治意愿都会被耗竭。法洛总结道：“所有这些听起来都很合乎经济规律，但你究竟能不能设立一个规模足够大或足够正确的奖项，能在这些情形下有效运行，这是件值得怀疑的事。”
但是，“发达市场承诺”的支持者们相信，这些问题是可以克服的。全球发展中心(Center for Global Development)总部位于华盛顿特区，是评估和支持“发达市场承诺”的领衔力量。这家智库的副总裁鲁丝•莱文(Ruth Levine)称：“毫无疑问，总会找到一种以分析为基础的明智的办法来解决这些挑战。我这么说的意思是：人们会依据良好的实践经验，拟定具有实质意义的提议或合同。”
试点计划就是肺炎球菌疫苗奖。它于2007年2月原则上设立，现在已基本成形。这是一笔大交易——大笔资金放到了桌面上，有可能以较低的成本拯救数百万人的生命。但是，与其他可能的“发达市场承诺”相比，肺炎球菌还是个相对简单的问题，因为有两种可靠的疫苗已经进入最后的研发阶段。莱文承认，相对于纯粹的创新奖和采购合同，这个案例的近似程度相同，但她相信，对于捐赠人能否做出共同承诺并解决好法律和财务方面的挑战，人们可以通过这次演练加深了解。她表示：“这绝不会是一次纯粹的尝试，看看将一种类似市场招标的东西放在遥远的将来，能否给公司带来进行早期研发的动力。”
这是“发达市场承诺”支持者们的梦想，但真正的考验——疟疾和艾滋病疫苗奖——尚未到来。只有到了那一天，我们才能看到私营公司是否会上钩，公共投入能否物有所值。可以肯定的是，大型制药公司会检查附属细则：钟表大师约翰•哈里森只是在直接向英王乔治三世(George III)上诉之后，最终才为其精良准确的航海用表争取到了奖励。从来没有人认定，他或者是其他任何人满足了获得“经度大奖”的必要条件。
译者/李晖
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