Dear Massimo, I have been involved with evaluations of research infrastructure in Australia, but this was as an economist in a consulting environment - not as a researcher or academic. I have completed a number of social cost-benefit analyses as a consultant too, including in the health context. In terms of research infrastructure, my former colleague Dr David Campbell who works for ACIL Allen Consulting is the key person here in Australia behind research infrastructure evaluations and he tends to take an options based approach (option value of infrastructure). He has assisted a number of institutions with their NCRIS bids (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy), and you can see some case studies on the NCRIS home page https://education.gov.au/national-collaborative-research-infrastructure-strategy-ncris He is also a key consultant to the Square Kilometer Array project and others. Maybe contact him? But I am also happy to read anything you have got and provide feedback. Cheers, Raoul

Dear Raoul, thanks for this information. If you are interested, please give a look to www.eiburs.unimi.it where we describe our project, and to the paper cited in the question text above. We have forthcoming case studies on LHC and CNAO (hadrontherapy).  We are going to edit a special issue with an open call for paper in Technology Forecasting and Social Change, you or your contacts may be interested in submitting something there. 

Thank you, Massimo. I had a quick look at your paper, which provides a lot of valuable and detailed information and I think I understand the basic approach you take to modelling. I assume the social discount rate chosen would, as usual, have a big impact on whether the NPV for a specific project comes out positive or not. In practical terms, in the projects that I have been involved with, we typically needed to demonstrate at least a potential size of benefit of new knowledge by giving examples of areas of application and working out some of the values that may have previously been generated by other projects with 'comparable' types of impacts (a lot of this depends on detailed discussion with the experts / scientists, and 'clever' extrapolation, which is where the consultants typically come in!). So the idea of the option value taken in these projects I was involved with is made a bit more concrete, and Monte Carlo type simulations are added almost as a sensitivity analysis. I am not an academic so I am sorry I can't give more detailed feedback, but I will forward your paper to my former colleague. Regards, Raoul