Betting on the Horse or the Jockey in the Public Fund? The Contingent Effects of Experts’ Experience

The mechanisms through which public funding allocates resources to innovative ventures—specifically, whether governments prioritize the “jockey” (the entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team) or the “horse” (the technology or idea)—remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by analyzing the determinants of public funding decisions through the lens of institutional funding logic, utilizing logit models on a dataset of 5,569 observations from InnoFund Beijing. The findings reveal that the technology merit exerts approximately twice the influence of team capability in predicting a venture’s likelihood of securing public funds. This suggests that, in the context of public funding, the “horse” (technology) is prioritized over the “jockey” (team). Furthermore, the study uncovers significant anchoring biases in expert evaluations. Specifically, evaluators with prior research and development (R&D) experience tend to undervalue the importance of technology merit, while those with business expertise place less emphasis on team capability. By resolving the “horse vs. jockey” puzzle in public funding, this research deepens the understanding of institutional funding logic and contributes novel insights to policy design by highlighting how institutional priorities and evaluator biases shape resource allocation in emerging contexts.