I feel like it should be pretty obvious that almost all donation matchings that are advertised as such are at least a bit fake.
But this does not have to be the case. Not everyone sets aside a particular immutable amount they wish to donate (i.e., to give up of their own income).
Some people, even/especially some EA-types, might be willing to make their donation a ‘function subject to some apparent randomness’…
… if they believed that by doing so, it would encourage others to give more (effectively), on average. (I believe this relates to the quadratic voting stuff).
So GivingMultiplier (or something similar) could be set up to involve a counterfactual match.
GM could do something like:
supply a credible estimated distribution over ‘expected GM non-matcher donations in the absence of your pledge’
ask you commit to a positively-sloped donation function,
e.g. “I will donate $1000 additional over my lifetime for every 1% increase in the realized donations on Giving Multiplier relative to the prior distribution”
Then GM could do the maths, and credibly say to patrons
for every $50 you shift to AMF (or whatever) we expect AMF to get an additional $72.3 in total that it would not have otherwise received. Note this is indeed ‘incremental’ (explain more here, give links, footnotes, make the model transparent, etc).
Would this work better than the ‘illusory match’ in the long run
A. for getting non-EA people to give more to effective causes
B. for getting EA’s to increase their giving to unlock these ‘normies’?
Linch notes
But this does not have to be the case. Not everyone sets aside a particular immutable amount they wish to donate (i.e., to give up of their own income).
Some people, even/especially some EA-types, might be willing to make their donation a ‘function subject to some apparent randomness’… … if they believed that by doing so, it would encourage others to give more (effectively), on average. (I believe this relates to the quadratic voting stuff).
So GivingMultiplier (or something similar) could be set up to involve a counterfactual match.
GM could do something like:
supply a credible estimated distribution over ‘expected GM non-matcher donations in the absence of your pledge’
ask you commit to a positively-sloped donation function,
e.g. “I will donate $1000 additional over my lifetime for every 1% increase in the realized donations on Giving Multiplier relative to the prior distribution”
Then GM could do the maths, and credibly say to patrons
Would this work better than the ‘illusory match’ in the long run
A. for getting non-EA people to give more to effective causes B. for getting EA’s to increase their giving to unlock these ‘normies’?
I don’t know, but it might be worth testing out.