<p>I know that <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty">the bounty guidelines</a> state that bounties are not cancellable for any reason. This makes a lot of sense to me and it's a good default setting. But I'm thinking specifically about a situation I am facing on <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65264/three-questions-about-support-vector-regression-feature-pre-processing-time-se">this question</a>. The lone answer was posted before I started the bounty, and it does not address enough items for it to be worthy of collecting the bounty. However, no other responses have appeared.</p>

<p>In cases where the bounty fails to generate adequate answers due to total lack of responses, would it make sense to just cancel the bounty? I don't get to benefit unfairly by both having an adequate answer and also having my reputation refunded. Whereas if I can't cancel the bounty, I'm just facing a reputation loss as a consequence for trying to motivate interest in a question that community found uninteresting (for any reason).</p>

<p>Would it be easy to implement a cancellation option under the specific scenario that, after the bounty is created, no new answers to the question appear at all?</p>

<p>If not, what is the specific rationale in this case? Does the community want to penalize  for not writing a question that, according to the preferences of other community members, is sufficiently interesting to merit effort on a response? Why wouldn't we just close those questions as not constructive and no reputation changes would take place?</p>
