Is it appropriate to offer a second bounty when the first one has expired with no answer?

Question

I'm wondering if it's against site rules or some unwritten stats.stackexchange.com etiquette.

If it's not I'm wondering if it's considered to be appropriate (in the sense of wise) to make a second bounty.

Clearly some questions are so ill-formed that they have no chance of being successfully answered, and so creating another bounty would just waste reputation points. I'm not well-informed enough to know for sure if my bounty question was one of those, but I suspect it was not hopelessly ill-formed, although it was also not a very interesting question, as it related to a rather specific research scenario. However, I wonder if the extra points (me chucking in 200, say, instead of the 100 I already put in) are likely to make a difference.

Answer 1

You're mixing questions.

Are repeated bounties against any rules? Apparently not. Your reputation is yours, to gamble away if you think it's worth the risk.

Is offering them regarded as poor behaviour? I haven't detected any feeling against repeated bounties, but then they seem to be rare.

Would a second bounty work? An optimist would argue that you are just trying harder and just need someone competent in a particular field to notice the second bounty who didn't notice the first. A pessimist would ask what grounds you have for thinking that the second bounty would fare any better.

In practice, I think it is better to think about re-wording the question. If you linked your question here, you might get informed guesses about why it attracted so little attention.

Personally I never am influenced by the size of a bounty or even the existence of one. A bounty doesn't pull any question into the limits of my expertise. Bounties don't even make questions more noticeable to me, as I have stopped checking specifically for questions with bounties. But this is human behaviour; there might be bounty hunters here!

I think you are referring to Is the ALRE method of standardization/rescaling appropriate for proportion data?