If I offered you an deal that paid you $10 for every $1 invested, with the caveat that it would also pay your competitor $11, would you actually not accept it?
Wouldn't it be rational to wait for my competitor to take you up on that deal? Then I could spend the extra money on research that only benefits myself.
Surely more rational: club together and pay the cost you all pay less, you can repeat and get access to even more opportunities, you can all get the benefits.
Applied across all actors, your strategy results in nobody taking the deal, the worst outcome for everyone but me.
It’s such a strange, “everyone loses” attitude, but people are strange. Studies of the Ultimatum Game [1] show that people will actually refuse free money if it meant someone else got more.
If I offered you an deal that paid you $10 for every $1 invested, with the caveat that it would also pay your competitor $11, would you actually not accept it?