New Zealand’s Health Research Council has a grants scheme allocated by a lottery of (peer-approved) proposals. Lucy Pomeroy (HRC NZ) and colleagues asked applicants over six years what they thought. 

“Multiple respondents” like a lottery when ineligible applications aren’t in the draw and outstanding proposals are pre-funded, so that all up for selection “are truly equal.”

“Support for randomisation was higher amongst researchers who won funding, which indicates the difficulty of decoupling researchers’ thoughts about a funding system from their personal experience,” they found.