Thanks to @Eli_Nathan for responding to all these, though I hope you don’t feel obliged to do so.
@MichaelPlant makes a good case that the right way to think of these is that attendance has a large positive externality—that it creates a lot more benefit to the world at large than to attendees themselves.
In this sense, increasing the price presumably suggests that CEAs funders don’t believe the externality is as large as they used to or that the funding bar has gone up, or both.
It seems that explicitly thinking about it in these terms is useful:
Orgs might write pieces in support of the value that they gain from EAGs happening to create a better case for grants to CEA.
It might be helpful to hear how connections benefit those who aren’t the two people connected
Re your second bullet, a large part of it is that one of the two people in a new connection may be financial unempowered. That is, they’re a student or other early career person who isn’t really able to spend much money on anything (this represents a lot of our attendees and is where philanthropy can jump in to fill the gap).
Though surely much of their benefit is meeting attendees who are well-connected/experts. I guess if it turns out the price increase dissuades the latter group, it may need a rethink.
Yeah that’s right, I wouldn’t want to raise the prices so much such that more senior folk/experts are put off (especially as they might be providing value, and as such it might feel weird to them to have to pay for that). Right now I expect we’ll have a variety of ticket prices with optional discounts for those who need them, so I’m not too worried about more senior folks getting priced out here.
Thanks to @Eli_Nathan for responding to all these, though I hope you don’t feel obliged to do so.
@MichaelPlant makes a good case that the right way to think of these is that attendance has a large positive externality—that it creates a lot more benefit to the world at large than to attendees themselves.
In this sense, increasing the price presumably suggests that CEAs funders don’t believe the externality is as large as they used to or that the funding bar has gone up, or both.
It seems that explicitly thinking about it in these terms is useful:
Orgs might write pieces in support of the value that they gain from EAGs happening to create a better case for grants to CEA.
It might be helpful to hear how connections benefit those who aren’t the two people connected
Re your second bullet, a large part of it is that one of the two people in a new connection may be financial unempowered. That is, they’re a student or other early career person who isn’t really able to spend much money on anything (this represents a lot of our attendees and is where philanthropy can jump in to fill the gap).
Though surely much of their benefit is meeting attendees who are well-connected/experts. I guess if it turns out the price increase dissuades the latter group, it may need a rethink.
Yeah that’s right, I wouldn’t want to raise the prices so much such that more senior folk/experts are put off (especially as they might be providing value, and as such it might feel weird to them to have to pay for that). Right now I expect we’ll have a variety of ticket prices with optional discounts for those who need them, so I’m not too worried about more senior folks getting priced out here.
Seems like you’re going great work on this. If anything sounds like you folks should weigh your inside view more.
It seems likely to me that the externality is likely to be larger earlier on in a social movement than as it becomes more established.