Valuing new information: How can we take better decisions about what evaluations to pursue?

Do development decision-makers spend too much/too little on gathering evidence? The development community at large agrees that decisions should be based on evidence, but what tools do we have to help decision-makers decide whether new evidence generation activities (like evaluations) are worth the cost, especially when those costs could otherwise be spend on program implementation?

A small team at IDinsight has been working to turn the concept of value of information (VoI) into a rigorous and practical approach to estimating the value of new research in the international development sector. We suspect that too little is spent on new information in some contexts and too much in others because decision-makers rarely base the research funding decision on the question: “how much will our social impact improve based on this information (in expectation)?” Even when new research is clearly valuable, studies are often designed based on defaults for academic studies, rather than optimized for the cost-effectiveness of information given the decision at hand. Our goal is to develop practical methods for reducing the social impact lost due to poor research funding decisions: either the failure to fund research that would be high VoI or the choice to redirect funds from impactful programs to low-VoI research.

In this session, we will present our approach to calculating the optimal investment in new research given the decision needs at hand and helping resource-constrained decision makers take better decisions about which evaluations are worth pursuing. There will be plenty of time for feedback and discussion on whether VoI approaches are valuable in this context, how our methods could be made more rigorous, and how we can collectively innovate to ensure funds are directed towards the most impactful research.