Social benefits and costs of large scale research infrastructures

•We propose a model to assess social costs and benefits of research infrastructures.•Benefits and costs are valued at the marginal production cost or willingness to pay.•Knowledge creation and diffusion can be valued with bibliometric techniques.•Some costs and benefits cancel out so that the RI in part pays for itself.•Contingent valuation can be used to value the social preferences for scientific discovery.

This paper explores some of the methodological issues involved in a cost-benefit analysis framework for large scale capital-intensive research infrastructures. We propose a conceptual model based on the estimation of quantities and shadow prices of cost aggregates, and of six main categories of economic benefits: technological spillovers, human capital formation, knowledge outputs, cultural effects, services to third parties including consumers, and a public good, the pure value of discovery. We justify the reasons why these benefits of research infrastructures should be often expected to be the core ones in ex-ante project evaluation. Other benefits may be considered as well, but often by qualitative methods only. Empirical approaches are suggested for further applied research.