Burning money just transfers the value of that money to holders of other money through deflation. So your generousity is still assigning some amount of value to your co-experimentee that otherwise would distributed throughout the economy.
But if the reward was something of intrinsic value, precommitting to destroying unused rewards could work.
But for a fixed amount of fumes, they need not a fixed amount of money but a fixed amount of bills. If their surplus is greater than expected, the experimenters can simply burn larger denominations.
Burning money in sufficent sums is privately paid deflation. If they hand out their money to subjects it gets back into the economic cycle. If they burn it it is gone.
Clearly the scientists must precommit to burning all the money they don’t use.
Burning money just transfers the value of that money to holders of other money through deflation. So your generousity is still assigning some amount of value to your co-experimentee that otherwise would distributed throughout the economy.
But if the reward was something of intrinsic value, precommitting to destroying unused rewards could work.
I doubt they can document that as an expense within the parameters of their grants.
Unless they also had another grant to research the fumes emitted by burning money.
No, for that they’d need a fixed amount of fumes.
But for a fixed amount of fumes, they need not a fixed amount of money but a fixed amount of bills. If their surplus is greater than expected, the experimenters can simply burn larger denominations.
Burning money in sufficent sums is privately paid deflation. If they hand out their money to subjects it gets back into the economic cycle. If they burn it it is gone.
On Southpark the smell of money cured Aids.