My use of non-”standard” terminology seems to have caused confusion; if I understand yours correctly, I think it is the bonus donor who usually gets more than $1 of value. The bonus donor surrenders control over which of six super-effective charities receives his $X. In exchange, the bonus donor gains influence over whether $2X from the standard donor goes to a standard charity or a super-effective one. Given EA beliefs about how starkly more cost-effective its preferred charities are over the median charity, the bonus donor likely views this control-for-influence trade as a net positive unless they have a strong preference among the six super-effective charities. It’s the standard donor who is getting the short end of the stick in my estimation.
However, I think “$2 in, $2 out” obscures that mutually beneficial trades of control/influence can occur. The existence of mutually beneficial trades is, after all, fundamental to economics. When we are discussing trades in an economic marketplace, we assign value based on how each trade participant values what they gave up and what they got. If I buy a widget at $1 but would have been willing to pay up to $1.25 for it, we would say that the trade has generated 25 cents of consumer surplus. We wouldn’t say that the widget must be assigned the same value on both ends of the transaction, and thus all trades are zero-sum and surplus cannot exist. Applying this model back to matching, it would seem consistent of us to calculate aggregate donor value based on the honestly held preferences of each donor and the true economic substance of the transaction.
So it’s possible for a trade to result in more utils under the preferences of both donors and those of the facilitator. Maybe the most extreme example would be a case in which I was planning to donate $1 to Politician Red, and you were planning to donate $1 to Politician Blue, but we both surrendered full control over our donation in exchange for influencing the other to donate the $1 to AMF instead. Or less dramatically, suppose I slightly favor effective animal-welfare charities over effective health ones, while my brother is relatively indifferent between effective and his favored non-effective health charities (but strongly prefers either to any animal-welfare charity). We can compromise on the effective health charity, rather than splitting 50⁄50 between our first choices.
On those trades, it seems really incongruous to say that there was $2 of impact before, and yet only $2 after. In the me/brother example, you could say that there was only $1.10 of impact pre-trade ($1 for me, 10 cents for my brother) and $1.90 post-trade (95 cents for each dollar spent, since we stipulated that the animal-welfare charity was slightly more impactful). I would roughly allocate that impact as $1.40 for me / 50 cents for my brother. Why? It seems illogical to assign less impact for the donor’s own dollar than they would have attained prior to a mutually beneficial trade, and “split the surplus” seems like a reasonable default rule. But the end result is that the trade (which is equivalent in effect to a “match”) has indeed increased the impact attributable to both my brother and to me! So, the claim that one can often increase impact by trading control/influence with a donor who would otherwise make suboptimal choices would evaluate as true. And I think that’s the core claim that donation-matching orgs are often making, at least to EAs?
My use of non-”standard” terminology seems to have caused confusion; if I understand yours correctly, I think it is the bonus donor who usually gets more than $1 of value. The bonus donor surrenders control over which of six super-effective charities receives his $X. In exchange, the bonus donor gains influence over whether $2X from the standard donor goes to a standard charity or a super-effective one. Given EA beliefs about how starkly more cost-effective its preferred charities are over the median charity, the bonus donor likely views this control-for-influence trade as a net positive unless they have a strong preference among the six super-effective charities. It’s the standard donor who is getting the short end of the stick in my estimation.
However, I think “$2 in, $2 out” obscures that mutually beneficial trades of control/influence can occur. The existence of mutually beneficial trades is, after all, fundamental to economics. When we are discussing trades in an economic marketplace, we assign value based on how each trade participant values what they gave up and what they got. If I buy a widget at $1 but would have been willing to pay up to $1.25 for it, we would say that the trade has generated 25 cents of consumer surplus. We wouldn’t say that the widget must be assigned the same value on both ends of the transaction, and thus all trades are zero-sum and surplus cannot exist. Applying this model back to matching, it would seem consistent of us to calculate aggregate donor value based on the honestly held preferences of each donor and the true economic substance of the transaction.
So it’s possible for a trade to result in more utils under the preferences of both donors and those of the facilitator. Maybe the most extreme example would be a case in which I was planning to donate $1 to Politician Red, and you were planning to donate $1 to Politician Blue, but we both surrendered full control over our donation in exchange for influencing the other to donate the $1 to AMF instead. Or less dramatically, suppose I slightly favor effective animal-welfare charities over effective health ones, while my brother is relatively indifferent between effective and his favored non-effective health charities (but strongly prefers either to any animal-welfare charity). We can compromise on the effective health charity, rather than splitting 50⁄50 between our first choices.
On those trades, it seems really incongruous to say that there was $2 of impact before, and yet only $2 after. In the me/brother example, you could say that there was only $1.10 of impact pre-trade ($1 for me, 10 cents for my brother) and $1.90 post-trade (95 cents for each dollar spent, since we stipulated that the animal-welfare charity was slightly more impactful). I would roughly allocate that impact as $1.40 for me / 50 cents for my brother. Why? It seems illogical to assign less impact for the donor’s own dollar than they would have attained prior to a mutually beneficial trade, and “split the surplus” seems like a reasonable default rule. But the end result is that the trade (which is equivalent in effect to a “match”) has indeed increased the impact attributable to both my brother and to me! So, the claim that one can often increase impact by trading control/influence with a donor who would otherwise make suboptimal choices would evaluate as true. And I think that’s the core claim that donation-matching orgs are often making, at least to EAs?