Sometimes funders try to play 5d chess with each other to avoid funging each other’s donations, and this results in the charity not getting enough funding.
That seems like it could be a defection in a moral trade, which is likely to burn gains of trade. Often you can just talk to the other funder and split 50:50 or use something awesome like the S-Process.
But I’ve been in the situation where I wanted to make a grant/donation (I was doing ETG), knew of the other donor, but couldn’t communicate with them because they were anonymous to me. Hence I resorted to a bit of proto-ECL: There are two obvious Schelling points, (1) both parties each fill half of the funding gap, or (2) both parties each put half of their pre-update budget into the funding gap. Point 2 is inferior because the other party knows, without even knowing me, that more likely than not my donation budget is much smaller than half the funding gap, and because the concept of the funding gap is subjective and unhelpful anyway. Point 1 should thus be the compromise point of which it is relatively obvious to both parties that is should be obvious to both parties. Hence I donated half my pre-update budget.
There’s probably a lot more game theory that can be done on refining this acausal moral trade strategy, but I think it’s pretty good already, probably better than the status quo without communication.
A bit of a tangent, but:
That seems like it could be a defection in a moral trade, which is likely to burn gains of trade. Often you can just talk to the other funder and split 50:50 or use something awesome like the S-Process.
But I’ve been in the situation where I wanted to make a grant/donation (I was doing ETG), knew of the other donor, but couldn’t communicate with them because they were anonymous to me. Hence I resorted to a bit of proto-ECL: There are two obvious Schelling points, (1) both parties each fill half of the funding gap, or (2) both parties each put half of their pre-update budget into the funding gap. Point 2 is inferior because the other party knows, without even knowing me, that more likely than not my donation budget is much smaller than half the funding gap, and because the concept of the funding gap is subjective and unhelpful anyway. Point 1 should thus be the compromise point of which it is relatively obvious to both parties that is should be obvious to both parties. Hence I donated half my pre-update budget.
There’s probably a lot more game theory that can be done on refining this acausal moral trade strategy, but I think it’s pretty good already, probably better than the status quo without communication.