  Research funding agencies routinely use a proportion of their total revenues
to support internal administration and marketing costs. The ratio of
administration to total costs, referred to as the administration ratio, is
highly variable and within any single fund depends on many factors including
the number and average size of projects and the overall efficiency of the
funding agency. In this study, the standard agency activities have been
identified and used to develop a model of administration costs against expected
outcomes. In particular, the model has been designed to estimate the optimum
portfolio success rate and administration ratio as a function of a range of key
input variables including the project size, the complexity of proposal
evaluation and project management, the risk tolerance of the sponsor and the
targeted research domain.
