Sequential R&D Strategy for Synfuels

The basic point of this article is that a "crash program" mentality leads to inappropriate questions and wrong answers about policy issues in large-scale government subsidized research, like the development of synfuels. R&D funding should be viewed as a sequential decision, not a once-and-for-all choice. Using some new results in the theory of information gathering, we apply an operational sequential methodology to analyze whether the U.S. government should subsidize the development of liquid synthetic fuels from coal.