First, there was a lot of work by Robin Hanson 15-20 years ago on Conditional contracts and prediction-based contracts that might be relevant.
Second, a key issue with this sort of donation is that the organizations themselves are left with a lot of uncertainty until the contract resolves. If the contracts are really transparent, they might have some idea what is happening, but it seems likely that tons of such contracts would lead to really messy and highly uncertain future cash flows that would make planning much harder. I’m unsure if there’s a clear way to fix this, but it’s probably worth thinking about more. (The alternative is for people to just wait on making the donation, which is not at all transparent and makes precommitment and coordination around joint giving impossible, but obviously requires much less complexity.)
Two short points.
First, there was a lot of work by Robin Hanson 15-20 years ago on Conditional contracts and prediction-based contracts that might be relevant.
Second, a key issue with this sort of donation is that the organizations themselves are left with a lot of uncertainty until the contract resolves. If the contracts are really transparent, they might have some idea what is happening, but it seems likely that tons of such contracts would lead to really messy and highly uncertain future cash flows that would make planning much harder. I’m unsure if there’s a clear way to fix this, but it’s probably worth thinking about more. (The alternative is for people to just wait on making the donation, which is not at all transparent and makes precommitment and coordination around joint giving impossible, but obviously requires much less complexity.)