Why do you care if it is done to your satisfaction when the prize is awarded based on other's satisfaction with it?

Why do I care... what I care? Seriously?

But I do agree with your expected utility calculations. The problem is, I can't motivate myself to write under conditions of uncertainty like that. I understand that shouldn't matter, especially since I consider such a project worthwhile even in the absence of $155, but it does.

From what I remember of the prize literature, prizes work best for well-delineated, objectively judgeable accomplishments. Like putting a rocket into orbit - you can plan out what is necessary, and it's clear when you succeeded. A literature review isn't really either. So I'm not sure a prize in general is succeeded for the task.

My personal problems are that:

1. I can't bring myself to start a new project like intensively researching spaced repetition to establish exactly how good the evidence is, how effective it is, and what domains it does and does not work in, without having a good idea of what I might receive in turn. Uncertainty is paralyzing for me.
2. This is especially true because your prize is large - I felt guilty taking a bitcoin from Kiba for Bitcoin is Worse is Better because I knew it was incomplete in several respects, although it's one of my best essays and gave him a lot of traffic; and a bitcoin is only worth $20, so how would I feel delivering something bad for $155? I'd feel really terrible!

The difficult questions are:

• How much does spaced repetition actually help memory?

  Quantifying the advantage in any more than an ad hoc way like http://www.gwern.net/Mnemosyne#fn3 would be difficult since it requires delving into the specifics of the data, and forgetting curves are non-linear so it's not clear what is even meant by 'how much' - memories per review at 1 year? At 10 years? At 50 years? Integrated over an actuarially projected lifespan?

• Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs?

  There's probably no direct research on this, so now one has to delve into related research fields and look for very weak evidence or correlations, like maybe high memory correlated with longevity in old people.

• Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on?

  New research tends to be hard to get (= wasted time going around paywalls) and requires following a lot of citations in bibliographies and checking out blogs and emails to really get a sense of where a field is now.

The best way is probably to informally or formally contract with someone like lukeprog (who does this sort of literature review routinely) to conduct the review.

It is a compromise between fuzzies v. utilons because I am unable to purchase them separately along with some other constraints. If the money goes to a charity I get more fuzzies, and given that whoever would do this would likely pick a charity that I consider to be a worthwhile charity (given the general framework of LW) there's a high chance that it will produce heavy utilons. I also don't have that much money so I can convince myself to part with more if I know that it is going to a charity rather than going to someone's personal use.