EA Animal Welfare fund does ask on their application form about counterfactual funding, IE “If we don’t fund you will anyone else fund you?/what would happen if we don’t fund you” of course as an org it can be hard to know if you’ll get funding or not so in some sense you’re being speculative when answering this question
I suppose the realistic effect is you may donate let’s say an additional 1 month of runway to the org, therefore the org applies for 1 months less funding from EA Animal Welfare next time round, and that money then flows through to the next best opportunity EA Animal Welfare would fund, so the effect may be thought of as additional money going to the worst/borderline EA Animal welfare grantee, at least that would be my speculation in this situation
so the effect may be thought of as additional money going to the worst/borderline EA Animal welfare grantee
Yeah, that’s the funging scenario that I had in mind. :) It’s fine if everyone agrees about the ranking of the different charities. It’s not great if the donor to the funged charity thinks the funged charity is significantly better than the average Animal Welfare Fund grant.
EA Animal Welfare fund does ask on their application form about counterfactual funding
Interesting! That does support the idea there is some funging that happens intentionally. Of course, I don’t think that’s a bad thing in general. The Animal Welfare Fund has a duty to spend its donors’ money as effectively as possible, and that includes not funding something that another (perhaps less EA-minded) donor would have funded anyway. The problem is that I take the same attitude: I don’t want to spend my limited money on something that other donors (including the Animal Welfare Fund) would have funded otherwise. The result is a “giver’s dilemma”, which Karnofsky illustrated with this example:
Imagine that two donors, Alice and Bob, are both considering supporting a charity whose room for more funding is $X, and each is willing to give the full $X to close that gap. If Alice finds out about Bob’s plans, her incentive is to give nothing to the charity, since she knows Bob will fill its funding gap. Conversely, if Bob finds out about Alice’s funding plans, his incentive is to give nothing to the charity and perhaps support another instead. This creates a problematic situation in which neither Alice nor Bob has the incentive to be honest with the other about his/her giving plans and preferences—and each has the incentive to try to wait out the other’s decision.
This is relevant to the idea I suggested in the penultimate paragraph of my post. If the Animal Welfare Fund published a list of funding gaps that it wasn’t going to fill, this could encourage individual donors to only give to places that the Animal Welfare Fund wouldn’t. But then the Animal Welfare Fund would take on the burden of funding all of the best charities (by its lights), which wouldn’t be fair to people who donated to the Animal Welfare Fund. The Fund would prefer for the charities it thinks are best to get as much funding from others as possible. That could imply not disclosing ahead of time where the Fund would be donating, although I doubt the Fund managers are thinking too strategically about this particular issue, and their future grants are often somewhat predictable from past grants anyway.
The section “B. A value certificate equilibrium” in this post[1] might be of interest, because it kind of provides one solution to that coordination problem. In theory you could try to get the Animal Welfare fund to agree on that coordination solution, and then estimate parameters for your case, and then send a bill/donation to the Animal Welfare fund to reach that solution. That said, for relatively small amounts, my guess is that this would be too much work.
Hi Brian,
EA Animal Welfare fund does ask on their application form about counterfactual funding, IE “If we don’t fund you will anyone else fund you?/what would happen if we don’t fund you” of course as an org it can be hard to know if you’ll get funding or not so in some sense you’re being speculative when answering this question
I suppose the realistic effect is you may donate let’s say an additional 1 month of runway to the org, therefore the org applies for 1 months less funding from EA Animal Welfare next time round, and that money then flows through to the next best opportunity EA Animal Welfare would fund, so the effect may be thought of as additional money going to the worst/borderline EA Animal welfare grantee, at least that would be my speculation in this situation
Thanks!
Yeah, that’s the funging scenario that I had in mind. :) It’s fine if everyone agrees about the ranking of the different charities. It’s not great if the donor to the funged charity thinks the funged charity is significantly better than the average Animal Welfare Fund grant.
Interesting! That does support the idea there is some funging that happens intentionally. Of course, I don’t think that’s a bad thing in general. The Animal Welfare Fund has a duty to spend its donors’ money as effectively as possible, and that includes not funding something that another (perhaps less EA-minded) donor would have funded anyway. The problem is that I take the same attitude: I don’t want to spend my limited money on something that other donors (including the Animal Welfare Fund) would have funded otherwise. The result is a “giver’s dilemma”, which Karnofsky illustrated with this example:
This is relevant to the idea I suggested in the penultimate paragraph of my post. If the Animal Welfare Fund published a list of funding gaps that it wasn’t going to fill, this could encourage individual donors to only give to places that the Animal Welfare Fund wouldn’t. But then the Animal Welfare Fund would take on the burden of funding all of the best charities (by its lights), which wouldn’t be fair to people who donated to the Animal Welfare Fund. The Fund would prefer for the charities it thinks are best to get as much funding from others as possible. That could imply not disclosing ahead of time where the Fund would be donating, although I doubt the Fund managers are thinking too strategically about this particular issue, and their future grants are often somewhat predictable from past grants anyway.
The section “B. A value certificate equilibrium” in this post[1] might be of interest, because it kind of provides one solution to that coordination problem. In theory you could try to get the Animal Welfare fund to agree on that coordination solution, and then estimate parameters for your case, and then send a bill/donation to the Animal Welfare fund to reach that solution. That said, for relatively small amounts, my guess is that this would be too much work.
Sadly amateurishly/immaturely written, though I think that the core point gets across.