Rationally and ideally, you should just maximize the expected value of your actions, taking into account your potential influence on others and their costs, including opportunity costs. This just follows assuming expected utility theory axioms. It doesn’t matter that there are other agents; you can just capture them as part of your outcomes under consideration.
When you’re assigning credit across other actors whose impacts aren’t roughly independent, including for estimating their cost-effectiveness for funding, Shapley values (or something similar) can be useful. You want assigned credit to sum to 100% to avoid double counting or undercounting. (Credit for some actors can even be negative, though.)
But, if you were going to calculate Shapley values, which means estimating a bunch of subgroup counterfactuals that didn’t or wouldn’t happen, anyway, you may be able to just directly estimate how to best allocate resources instead. You could skip credit assignments (EDIT especially ex ante credit assignments, or when future work will be similar to past work in effects).
Rationally and ideally, you should just maximize the expected value of your actions, taking into account your potential influence on others and their costs, including opportunity costs. This just follows assuming expected utility theory axioms. It doesn’t matter that there are other agents; you can just capture them as part of your outcomes under consideration.
When you’re assigning credit across other actors whose impacts aren’t roughly independent, including for estimating their cost-effectiveness for funding, Shapley values (or something similar) can be useful. You want assigned credit to sum to 100% to avoid double counting or undercounting. (Credit for some actors can even be negative, though.)
But, if you were going to calculate Shapley values, which means estimating a bunch of subgroup counterfactuals that didn’t or wouldn’t happen, anyway, you may be able to just directly estimate how to best allocate resources instead. You could skip credit assignments (EDIT especially ex ante credit assignments, or when future work will be similar to past work in effects).
(I endorse this.)