Why is Time-sharing Beneficial?

A critical element of the TESS research strategy is multiple studies from different disciplines sharing common observational platforms, all exploiting the inferential power and measurement efficiencies of experimental designs. This time-sharing on data collection platforms is the key to economic efficiencies of TESS. By distributing the costs of sampling, interviewing, and instrument collection over a large number of studies, the marginal cost of each study can be reduced by orders of magnitude, indeed, often to a tenth or less of what each would cost if done on its own.

Indeed, time-sharing follows an established scientific tradition. The natural sciences, for example, promote progress in many areas by instituting time-sharing on expensive instruments (e.g., particle accelerators and telescopes). Some of us also remember the benefits of time-sharing on university computer resources, which allowed many researchers to experience the benefits of computation before PC's became feasible and cost effective.

The advantages of time-sharing on the experimental platforms described above are substantial. First and foremost, time-sharing dramatically reduces the cost per experiment. This is true in part because the start up costs for launching any kind of large data collection effort are substantial. Time-sharing allows social science to experience the considerable economies of scale that come from paying such start up costs only once.

On the CATI platform, our time-sharing strategy also promotes efficiency in data collection by devoting approximately one-third of each interview to collecting demographic information that all investigators can share. If the experiments were conducted independently, each investigator would use time to collect such data on their own - increasing redundancy and reducing overall efficiency. Time-sharing is also an integral part of our Internet strategy. TESS realizes economies of scale by centralizing the fixed costs associated with directing this technology to scientific purposes.

TESS provides other economic efficiencies by reducing waste. Most national surveys collect responses from some relatively large, round number of respondents. Because most surveys are not designed to test a small number of specific hypotheses, there end up being more cases than was actually needed for some purposes, and perhaps too few for others. The flexibility of our instruments allow people to roll on for as many or few cases as they need, and they must justify the sample size requested as part of the proposal. In addition, scholars who may require only one or two items in order to accomplish their goals need not justify an entire 30 minute survey in order to have the opportunity to test their hypotheses. Flexibility in the instruments will allow more investigators to be served more efficiently.