Some of the combinatoric effect here is picking up on the number of projects, I think? If you have three projects in three separate orgs, your vote to fund one conveys information on which you rank first but not the rank order between the other two. If you have ten orgs with one project each, there are I think 36 pairwise comparisons and a first-place donation vote addresses only nine of them.
More generally: it may be worthwhile to distinguish more between donation/vote as an information mechanism and as an influence mechanism. It’s plausible to me that other features of the ecosystem could significantly impair both the potential informational and influential power of “votes” before we even got to considering the issue you describe here.
Donation/vote as a donor influence mechanism has some significant limitations in an ecosystem where the bulk of the funding comes from a few megadonors. To the extent that smaller donors think their donations funge with those of the megadonors, and that megadonors are more capable of adjusting to enact their global preferred funding allocations, the small donors may not believe that their votes have any meaningful influence on overall funding allocations. To the extent that smaller donors believe that, I expect the belief would have an significant effect on small-donor willingness to invest in casting informed “votes.” So it may seriously affect the epistemic / informational value of the votes too.
You could get some of the informational effect by merely asking donors to identify the specific program they’d like to donate to in a non-binding fashion. Of course, the advisory nature of the project-specific vote would likely make donors less willing to spend time on casting informed votes.
Some of the combinatoric effect here is picking up on the number of projects, I think? If you have three projects in three separate orgs, your vote to fund one conveys information on which you rank first but not the rank order between the other two. If you have ten orgs with one project each, there are I think 36 pairwise comparisons and a first-place donation vote addresses only nine of them.
More generally: it may be worthwhile to distinguish more between donation/vote as an information mechanism and as an influence mechanism. It’s plausible to me that other features of the ecosystem could significantly impair both the potential informational and influential power of “votes” before we even got to considering the issue you describe here.
Donation/vote as a donor influence mechanism has some significant limitations in an ecosystem where the bulk of the funding comes from a few megadonors. To the extent that smaller donors think their donations funge with those of the megadonors, and that megadonors are more capable of adjusting to enact their global preferred funding allocations, the small donors may not believe that their votes have any meaningful influence on overall funding allocations. To the extent that smaller donors believe that, I expect the belief would have an significant effect on small-donor willingness to invest in casting informed “votes.” So it may seriously affect the epistemic / informational value of the votes too.
You could get some of the informational effect by merely asking donors to identify the specific program they’d like to donate to in a non-binding fashion. Of course, the advisory nature of the project-specific vote would likely make donors less willing to spend time on casting informed votes.