The obvious criticism, I think, is: “couldn’t they benefit more from keeping the money?”
You want people to not have the money any more, otherwise e.g. a single Democrat with a $1K budget could donate repeatedly to match ten Republicans donating $1K each.
I’m not sure what the equilibrium would be, but it seems likely it would evolve towards all money being exactly matched, being returned to the users, and then being donated to the parties the normal way. Or perhaps people would stop using it altogether.
Another important detail here is which charities the money goes to—the Republican donor may not feel great if after matching the Democrat’s donation goes to e.g. Planned Parenthood. In the long run, I’d probably try to do surveys of users to find out which charities they’d object to the other side giving to, and not include those. But initially it could just be GiveWell charities for simplicity.
Re choice of charities
It seems pretty important for this sort of venture to build trust with users and have a lot of legitimacy. So, I think it is probably better to let people choose their own charities (excluding political ones for the reasons mentioned above).
You can still sway donations quite a lot based on the default behavior of the platform. In the long run, I’d probably have GiveWell charities as defaults (where you can point to GiveWell’s analysis for legitimacy, and you mostly don’t have to worry about room for more funding), and (if you wanted to be longtermist) maybe also a section of “our recommended charities” that is more longtermist with explanations of why those charities were selected.
You want people to not have the money any more, otherwise e.g. a single Democrat with a $1K budget could donate repeatedly to match ten Republicans donating $1K each.
I’m not sure what the equilibrium would be, but it seems likely it would evolve towards all money being exactly matched, being returned to the users, and then being donated to the parties the normal way. Or perhaps people would stop using it altogether.
Another important detail here is which charities the money goes to—the Republican donor may not feel great if after matching the Democrat’s donation goes to e.g. Planned Parenthood. In the long run, I’d probably try to do surveys of users to find out which charities they’d object to the other side giving to, and not include those. But initially it could just be GiveWell charities for simplicity.
It seems pretty important for this sort of venture to build trust with users and have a lot of legitimacy. So, I think it is probably better to let people choose their own charities (excluding political ones for the reasons mentioned above).
You can still sway donations quite a lot based on the default behavior of the platform. In the long run, I’d probably have GiveWell charities as defaults (where you can point to GiveWell’s analysis for legitimacy, and you mostly don’t have to worry about room for more funding), and (if you wanted to be longtermist) maybe also a section of “our recommended charities” that is more longtermist with explanations of why those charities were selected.