if Good Ventures committed to fully funding the GiveWell top charities, other donors might withdraw funding to fund the next-best thing by their values, confident that they’d be offset. A commitment to “splitting” would prevent this...
I have two main objections to this. First, the adversarial framing here seems unnecessary. If the other player hasn’t started defecting in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, why start?
If GV fully funded the top charities, and others also funded them, then they would be overfunded by GV’s lights. if A and B both like X (and have the same desired funding level for it), but have different second choices of Y and Z, the fully cooperative solution would not involve either A or B funding X alone.
if A and B both like X (and have the same desired funding level for it), but have different second choices of Y and Z, the fully cooperative solution would not involve either A or B funding X alone.
I’m not sure this is right. What if A and B both commit to fully funding their top charities, as soon as they find such opportunities (i.e., without taking other people’s reactions into consideration)? That seems like a fully cooperative solution that on expectation would work as well as A and B trying to negotiate a “fair division” of funding for X. Also, I’m not sure this analogy applies to the situation where A is a single big donor and B is a bunch of small donors, since in that case A and B can’t actually negotiate so A unilaterally deciding on a split would seem to lead to some deadweight loss (e.g., missed funding opportunities).
BTW, are you aware of a fully thought-out analysis of Good Venture’s “splitting” policy (whether such a policy is a good idea, and what the optimal split is)? For such an important question, I’m surprised how little apparent deliberation and empirical investigation has been done on it. Even if the value of information here is just 1% of the total funding, that would amount to about $100,000,000. (Not to mention that the analysis could be applied to other analogous situations with large and small donors.)
That’s true! Fortunately, there are a few important mitigating factors:
This game proceeds in continuous time, so there’s plenty of opportunity for donors to inform each other of their actions. For the GiveWell top charities, this often happens by reporting the donation to—or making it through—GiveWell.
As you’ve pointed out, excess donations—if they in fact turn out to be excess—can simply be funged against implicitly via lower room for more funding estimates in the following year.
A commitment to full funding doesn’t have to take the form of initially giving them the whole amount—for instance, if the estimated funding gap is X, and GV would expect other donors to contribute amount X-Y if it weren’t around, it can give Y, monitor other donations, and fill in gaps as they occur. It could even wait until after “giving season” to get more info.
Cross-posted from Ben’s blog:
If GV fully funded the top charities, and others also funded them, then they would be overfunded by GV’s lights. if A and B both like X (and have the same desired funding level for it), but have different second choices of Y and Z, the fully cooperative solution would not involve either A or B funding X alone.
[CoI notice: I consult for OpenPhil.]
I’m not sure this is right. What if A and B both commit to fully funding their top charities, as soon as they find such opportunities (i.e., without taking other people’s reactions into consideration)? That seems like a fully cooperative solution that on expectation would work as well as A and B trying to negotiate a “fair division” of funding for X. Also, I’m not sure this analogy applies to the situation where A is a single big donor and B is a bunch of small donors, since in that case A and B can’t actually negotiate so A unilaterally deciding on a split would seem to lead to some deadweight loss (e.g., missed funding opportunities).
BTW, are you aware of a fully thought-out analysis of Good Venture’s “splitting” policy (whether such a policy is a good idea, and what the optimal split is)? For such an important question, I’m surprised how little apparent deliberation and empirical investigation has been done on it. Even if the value of information here is just 1% of the total funding, that would amount to about $100,000,000. (Not to mention that the analysis could be applied to other analogous situations with large and small donors.)
That’s true! Fortunately, there are a few important mitigating factors:
This game proceeds in continuous time, so there’s plenty of opportunity for donors to inform each other of their actions. For the GiveWell top charities, this often happens by reporting the donation to—or making it through—GiveWell.
As you’ve pointed out, excess donations—if they in fact turn out to be excess—can simply be funged against implicitly via lower room for more funding estimates in the following year.
A commitment to full funding doesn’t have to take the form of initially giving them the whole amount—for instance, if the estimated funding gap is X, and GV would expect other donors to contribute amount X-Y if it weren’t around, it can give Y, monitor other donations, and fill in gaps as they occur. It could even wait until after “giving season” to get more info.