I think you’re right to be more uncomfortable with the counterfactual analysis in cases where you’re aligned with the other players in the game. Cribbing from a comment I’ve made on this topic before on the forum:
I think that counterfactual analysis is the right approach to take on the first point if/when you have full information about what’s going on. But in practice you essentially never have proper information on what everyone else’s counterfactuals would look like according to different actions you could take.
If everyone thinks in terms of something like “approximate shares of moral credit”, then this can help in coordinating to avoid situations where a lot of people work on a project because it seems worth it on marginal impact, but it would have been better if they’d all done something different. Doing this properly might mean impact markets (where the “market” part works as a mechanism for distributing cognition, so that each market participant is responsible for thinking through their own alternative options, and feeding that information into the system via their willingness to do work for different amounts of pay), but I think that you can get some rough approximation to the benefits of impact markets without actual markets by having people do the things they would have done with markets—and in this context, that means paying attention to the share of credit different parties would get.
Shapley values are one way to divide up that credit. They have some theoretical appeal, but it’s basically as “what would a fair division of credit be, which divides the surplus compared to outside options”. And they’re extremely complex to calculate so in practice I’d recommend against even trying. Instead just think of it as an approximate bargaining solution between the parties, and use some other approximation to bargaining solutions—I think Austin’s practice of looking to the business world for guidance is a reasonable approach here.
(If there’s nobody whom you’re plausibly coordinating with then I think trying to do a rough counterfactual analysis is reasonable, but that doesn’t feel true of any of your examples.)
I think you’re right to be more uncomfortable with the counterfactual analysis in cases where you’re aligned with the other players in the game. Cribbing from a comment I’ve made on this topic before on the forum:
I think that counterfactual analysis is the right approach to take on the first point if/when you have full information about what’s going on. But in practice you essentially never have proper information on what everyone else’s counterfactuals would look like according to different actions you could take.
If everyone thinks in terms of something like “approximate shares of moral credit”, then this can help in coordinating to avoid situations where a lot of people work on a project because it seems worth it on marginal impact, but it would have been better if they’d all done something different. Doing this properly might mean impact markets (where the “market” part works as a mechanism for distributing cognition, so that each market participant is responsible for thinking through their own alternative options, and feeding that information into the system via their willingness to do work for different amounts of pay), but I think that you can get some rough approximation to the benefits of impact markets without actual markets by having people do the things they would have done with markets—and in this context, that means paying attention to the share of credit different parties would get.
Shapley values are one way to divide up that credit. They have some theoretical appeal, but it’s basically as “what would a fair division of credit be, which divides the surplus compared to outside options”. And they’re extremely complex to calculate so in practice I’d recommend against even trying. Instead just think of it as an approximate bargaining solution between the parties, and use some other approximation to bargaining solutions—I think Austin’s practice of looking to the business world for guidance is a reasonable approach here.
(If there’s nobody whom you’re plausibly coordinating with then I think trying to do a rough counterfactual analysis is reasonable, but that doesn’t feel true of any of your examples.)