That’s an interesting line of thought. Some potential problems:
There may be a wealthy actor that doesn’t like a certain net-positive intervention (e.g. because they are a company that tries to avoid the regulation that the intervention aims to impose). Such an actor can attack the “positive shares” by buying all the “negative shares” and then artificially making their price arbitrarily high (by trading with themselves).
A more speculatively concern (not specific to your idea): Suppose that most traders would believe that: conditional on an existential catastrophe happening, owning the right certificate shares is less important. This may cause traders to give less weight to downside risks when making their decisions. (RowanBDonovan mentioned this issue here.)
Could 1 already be done? They could short the impact certificates, and even inflate the certificate price for oppositional work by trading it with themselves. An efficient impact certificate market should have the latter cause downward price pressure on the certificates they want to short, right?
This leads to an interesting question: how should certificates/organizations working exactly against each other be priced together in an efficient market? Presumably their market caps should be negatively correlated. Would an efficient market ensure one has a market cap near 0 (and so be drained of resources from the market)?
And then maybe this gives us a solution to the original problem without the need for artificially introducing something like negative impact certificates: if the expected value were negative, negative certificates can be introduced naturally and someone can start an oppositional organization or otherwise start doing oppositional work.
There might be reasons to think one side is more efficient than the other at achieving their desired outcome, though. I’m not sure what implications this would have.
I think “oppositional work” can’t always serve as a way to mitigate the harm of a net-negative projects (e.g. it doesn’t seem obvious what the “oppositional work” is for a net-negative outreach intervention).
Simply shorting shares doesn’t seem to me like a solution either. Suppose traders anticipate that the price of the share will be very high at some point in the future (due to the chance that the project ends up being very beneficial). Shorting the share will not substantially affect its price if the amount of money that participating traders can invest is sufficiently large.
That’s an interesting line of thought. Some potential problems:
There may be a wealthy actor that doesn’t like a certain net-positive intervention (e.g. because they are a company that tries to avoid the regulation that the intervention aims to impose). Such an actor can attack the “positive shares” by buying all the “negative shares” and then artificially making their price arbitrarily high (by trading with themselves).
A more speculatively concern (not specific to your idea): Suppose that most traders would believe that: conditional on an existential catastrophe happening, owning the right certificate shares is less important. This may cause traders to give less weight to downside risks when making their decisions. (RowanBDonovan mentioned this issue here.)
Could 1 already be done? They could short the impact certificates, and even inflate the certificate price for oppositional work by trading it with themselves. An efficient impact certificate market should have the latter cause downward price pressure on the certificates they want to short, right?
This leads to an interesting question: how should certificates/organizations working exactly against each other be priced together in an efficient market? Presumably their market caps should be negatively correlated. Would an efficient market ensure one has a market cap near 0 (and so be drained of resources from the market)?
And then maybe this gives us a solution to the original problem without the need for artificially introducing something like negative impact certificates: if the expected value were negative, negative certificates can be introduced naturally and someone can start an oppositional organization or otherwise start doing oppositional work.
There might be reasons to think one side is more efficient than the other at achieving their desired outcome, though. I’m not sure what implications this would have.
EDIT: Previously brought up here.
I think “oppositional work” can’t always serve as a way to mitigate the harm of a net-negative projects (e.g. it doesn’t seem obvious what the “oppositional work” is for a net-negative outreach intervention).
Simply shorting shares doesn’t seem to me like a solution either. Suppose traders anticipate that the price of the share will be very high at some point in the future (due to the chance that the project ends up being very beneficial). Shorting the share will not substantially affect its price if the amount of money that participating traders can invest is sufficiently large.