Timeline for Why does research cost so much money?

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Aug 25, 2014 at 17:05	comment	added	supercat		...driven in large measure by the amount one is willing to spend to expedite discoveries, which is in turn driven by the reward for finding things sooner rather than later. If a discovery would save a company $1,000,000/week, it may be worthwhile to spend $1,000,000 to simultaneously pursue thousands of possibilities for a month, even if an initial investment of $100 and a month's worth of research would allow one to eliminate half of the possibilities and shave the cost of the research by half.
Aug 25, 2014 at 16:47	comment	added	supercat		I would suggest that if one starts with two observations: (1) A person or group who spends a lot of resources trying to discover new things is apt to find at least some new things which would not have been discovered if they spent less; (2) many of the things which could be discovered with only a small expenditure of resources already have been. Because advancements in one field can often reduce the resource expenditures necessary to make discoveries in another, it's possible to make trade-offs between the cost per "discovery" and the rate of "discoveries". The cost of research is thus...
Aug 21, 2014 at 16:58	history	answered	kleineg	CC BY-SA 3.0