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That is the finding my doctorate turns on. Everything else on this site follows from it.
Organisations decide to let some criterion, such as sustainability, risk or access, influence what gets funded. A year later the portfolio looks much as it would have anyway, and nobody can say why.
The usual answer is that the criterion was not weighted heavily enough. That answer is often wrong. A criterion can enter a funding decision at three distinct points, and weighting is only one of them.
In the simulation in my thesis, changing the weight rarely changed which portfolio led. The eligibility rules had already settled it. That result is conditional on the case studied. The result about self-set targets is not: it requires no data at all.
The limit admits the portfolio that set it.
Holds whenever equality is permitted, the same measurement both sets and tests the limit, and the reference value stays fixed or is recomputed in the same state.
Eighteen years in pharmaceutical development: biostatistics at Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca and UCB, then a decade across Sandoz and Novartis in quantitative safety science, global programme leadership through regulatory filing, and corporate analytics.
Since 2022, a doctorate at ETH Zurich examining how funding decisions actually get made. I chair the Bayesian Scientific Working Group of the ASA Biopharmaceutical Section.
Take a sustainability target your organisation has already published, and ask three questions of it. Is equality permitted? Does the same measurement both set the limit and test against it? Does the reference value stay fixed, or get recomputed in the same state?
If all three hold, that target cannot oblige you to improve on it. No permission needed, nothing to buy, and you never have to tell me what you found.