Thanks for the comment above on presentation, Jason—will keep that in mind!
On the issue of pricing—I think this you/MHR make good points here, and it did slip my mind that the US market (for which we have the most data) is unrepresentative (e.g. we certainly wouldn’t want to use US insulin prices if we were examining diabetes interventions!).
My quick sense is that adjusting for this (as well as any bulk buying discount) puts the naive headline estimate into the GiveWell ballpark, but not enough to warrant deeper research if your expectation that further research is likely to cause estimated cost-effectiveness to drop even further anyway—as is the typically the experience of researchers (e.g. I think Eric Hausen had a good talk on this).
I think that makes sense. I think the value of making that adjustment is the move from “rather unlikely to be viable given that 0.03x is ~ 2 orders of magnitude away from the threshold for further research” to “this is not worth further pursuing now, but keep it in the back of your mind in case you happen across new information that would change the estimate in a moderately significant way / one can envision that there might be another intervention with synergistic effects that would sufficiently increase the benefits or reduce the costs of this one to consider packaging the two interventions together.”
Thanks for the comment above on presentation, Jason—will keep that in mind!
On the issue of pricing—I think this you/MHR make good points here, and it did slip my mind that the US market (for which we have the most data) is unrepresentative (e.g. we certainly wouldn’t want to use US insulin prices if we were examining diabetes interventions!).
My quick sense is that adjusting for this (as well as any bulk buying discount) puts the naive headline estimate into the GiveWell ballpark, but not enough to warrant deeper research if your expectation that further research is likely to cause estimated cost-effectiveness to drop even further anyway—as is the typically the experience of researchers (e.g. I think Eric Hausen had a good talk on this).
I think that makes sense. I think the value of making that adjustment is the move from “rather unlikely to be viable given that 0.03x is ~ 2 orders of magnitude away from the threshold for further research” to “this is not worth further pursuing now, but keep it in the back of your mind in case you happen across new information that would change the estimate in a moderately significant way / one can envision that there might be another intervention with synergistic effects that would sufficiently increase the benefits or reduce the costs of this one to consider packaging the two interventions together.”