This was comprehensive and I didn’t read carefully so I might have missed something: I think the likelihood of success might be too high, or at least not accounting for all likelihoods of success that is relevant to the cost effectiveness result. So my comment on likelihood has 2 parts:
Part 1: I think (and maybe I missed where you included it) you might want to also include the chance of success of the organization or project itself. Many start-ups fail due to bad team dynamics etc. independent of how likely suppliers might be to sign on. Maybe a CE success rate could be used as a prior.
Part 2: A 10% to 60% chance of a supplier signing on seems very high. This has a “middle value” of 35% (not sure what distribution you used). Coming from a sales point of view, your pitch to these companies seems way harder than e.g. selling some new cash registers to their stores. And I think often the likelihood of a sale is <1%. So if you only have 10 large retailers to “sell” this to, then the chance of failing to sell to any of them at the 1% level is 99%^10=90% meaning there is only a 10% chance of success (if I got my math right). So depending on how likely you think you are to make a “sale” and how many prospects of sufficient size you have, you might be able to calculate another indication of the chance of success to inform your analysis.
It was fun to read and I love how work such as yours probably make me expand my moral circle a bit—even if the chance of sentience is low, if the worms are sentient there are so many of them that this feels like unnecessary “moral risk”. Also, I hope I am mistaken and that the cost effectiveness is actually promising. I just wanted to provide what I hope might be constructive feedback as I got a bit of a feeling this intervention sounded a bit too unlikely to be cost effective.
Thanks for reading our work and engaging, Ulrik! I think your concern is fair and well spotted, we do feel the highest uncertainty in our estimates of likelihood of success.
Concerning part 1, as far as I know the CE incubation success rate is 80%, which considering our wide interval range is relatively close to 100%. I do agree that it seems to be an additional factor worth including, depending on whether we look at starting a new organisation or supporting an existing one with a good track record.
Concerning part 2, we updated on these numbers several times during the research process. One major source of optimism were our interviews with experts, whose experience suggested ~50% rate of success. We tried to look at past corporate campaigns, but a problem with using the existing data on other corporate campaigns is that the situation for silkworms as insects might be too different than when it comes to cage-free and broiler campaigns. The public concern, place of production and scale of the problem vary too strongly. There is also a long history of fashion corporate campaigns, but it is hard to find the numbers to estimate their average success rate. In our next steps section we highlight the need for a better understanding of the fashion industry and the retailer distribution and the benefits of consulting experts on the topic of fashion campaigns. We would expect this to significantly update our likelihood of success.
To sum it up, I mostly agree with your concerns. With our report we got to a point where we did not have the capacity to resolve these uncertainties in the time given, but know the next steps we would take to get to a more accurate CEA.
This was comprehensive and I didn’t read carefully so I might have missed something: I think the likelihood of success might be too high, or at least not accounting for all likelihoods of success that is relevant to the cost effectiveness result. So my comment on likelihood has 2 parts:
Part 1: I think (and maybe I missed where you included it) you might want to also include the chance of success of the organization or project itself. Many start-ups fail due to bad team dynamics etc. independent of how likely suppliers might be to sign on. Maybe a CE success rate could be used as a prior.
Part 2: A 10% to 60% chance of a supplier signing on seems very high. This has a “middle value” of 35% (not sure what distribution you used). Coming from a sales point of view, your pitch to these companies seems way harder than e.g. selling some new cash registers to their stores. And I think often the likelihood of a sale is <1%. So if you only have 10 large retailers to “sell” this to, then the chance of failing to sell to any of them at the 1% level is 99%^10=90% meaning there is only a 10% chance of success (if I got my math right). So depending on how likely you think you are to make a “sale” and how many prospects of sufficient size you have, you might be able to calculate another indication of the chance of success to inform your analysis.
It was fun to read and I love how work such as yours probably make me expand my moral circle a bit—even if the chance of sentience is low, if the worms are sentient there are so many of them that this feels like unnecessary “moral risk”. Also, I hope I am mistaken and that the cost effectiveness is actually promising. I just wanted to provide what I hope might be constructive feedback as I got a bit of a feeling this intervention sounded a bit too unlikely to be cost effective.
Thanks for reading our work and engaging, Ulrik!
I think your concern is fair and well spotted, we do feel the highest uncertainty in our estimates of likelihood of success.
Concerning part 1, as far as I know the CE incubation success rate is 80%, which considering our wide interval range is relatively close to 100%. I do agree that it seems to be an additional factor worth including, depending on whether we look at starting a new organisation or supporting an existing one with a good track record.
Concerning part 2, we updated on these numbers several times during the research process. One major source of optimism were our interviews with experts, whose experience suggested ~50% rate of success. We tried to look at past corporate campaigns, but a problem with using the existing data on other corporate campaigns is that the situation for silkworms as insects might be too different than when it comes to cage-free and broiler campaigns. The public concern, place of production and scale of the problem vary too strongly. There is also a long history of fashion corporate campaigns, but it is hard to find the numbers to estimate their average success rate. In our next steps section we highlight the need for a better understanding of the fashion industry and the retailer distribution and the benefits of consulting experts on the topic of fashion campaigns. We would expect this to significantly update our likelihood of success.
To sum it up, I mostly agree with your concerns. With our report we got to a point where we did not have the capacity to resolve these uncertainties in the time given, but know the next steps we would take to get to a more accurate CEA.