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Donor lotteries

TagLast edit: 17 May 2023 18:40 UTC by Pablo

A donor lottery is an arrangement where multiple prospective donors each contribute to a common pot in exchange for a chance, proportional to the size of the contribution, to win the right to decide how the pot is spent.

History

The concept of a donor lottery was first explicitly described by Carl Shulman in 2016,[1][2] as a development and refinement of some previous ideas by the author.[3] The first donor lottery was run in early 2017, by Shulman and Paul Christiano.[4] Many lotteries have taken place since then, and some of the winners have written detailed reports of the process they followed for allocating the funding pool.[5][6][7][8] As of May 2023, donor lotteries are run by Giving What We Can; they were previously run by Effective Altruism Funds. The most recent lottery, with a prize of $2 million, was drawn on 24 January 2023.

Justification

At its core, a donor lottery is a method for exploiting situations where there are increasing marginal returns to donation: the lottery converts a small budget into a small chance of winning a budget large enough to take advantage of economies of scale.

For illustration, consider an effective altruist who, instead of donating $1,000, buys a 1% chance of directing $100,000 to their chosen charity. Entering this lottery provides two distinct benefits. First, it cuts down research costs per expected dollar donated by a factor of 100, since researching donation alternatives becomes necessary only in the winning scenario. Second, it allows the altruist to fund projects whose minimum funding size exceeds their charitable budget.

In principle, someone persuaded that they could do more good in expectation with a small chance of a correspondingly larger donation could realize these gains by high-stakes gambling or high-risk investment. In practice, the associated overhead and transaction costs typically make donor lotteries a more attractive alternative.[1]

Further reading

Hoffman, Ben (2016) Claim explainer: donor lotteries and returns to scale, Arbital, December 30.

External links

Giving What We Can Donor Lottery.

Related entries

donation choice | donation writeup | effective altruism funding | effective giving | philanthropic coordination

  1. ^

    Shulman, Carl (2016) Creating a donor-advised fund lottery, Reflective Disequilibrium, March 27.

  2. ^

    Shulman, Carl (2016) Donor lotteries: demonstration and FAQ, Effective Altruism Forum, December 7.

  3. ^
  4. ^

    Christiano, Paul (2017) Donor lottery details, Effective Altruism Forum, January 10.

  5. ^

    Gleave, Adam (2018) 2017 donor lottery report, Effective Altruism Forum, November 12.

  6. ^

    Rheingans-Yoo, Ross (2020) 2018-19 Donor Lottery Report, pt. 1, Effective Altruism Forum, December 13.

  7. ^

    Rheingans-Yoo, Ross (2020) 2018-19 Donor Lottery Report, pt. 2, Effective Altruism Forum, December 14.

  8. ^

    Telleen-Lawton, Timothy (2020) Donor lottery debrief, Effective Altruism Forum, August 4.

  9. ^

    Deere, Sam (2021) The 2021 EA Funds Donor Lottery is now open, Effective Altruism Forum, November 29.

2018-19 Donor Lot­tery Re­port, pt. 1

Ross Rheingans-Yoo🔸13 Dec 2020 17:18 UTC
77 points
2 comments11 min readEA link

Why you should give to a donor lot­tery this Giv­ing Season

SamDeere17 Nov 2020 12:40 UTC
74 points
25 comments11 min readEA link

2018-19 Donor Lot­tery Re­port, pt. 2

Ross Rheingans-Yoo🔸14 Dec 2020 14:31 UTC
31 points
3 comments11 min readEA link

2017 Donor Lot­tery Report

AdamGleave12 Nov 2018 19:26 UTC
128 points
9 comments16 min readEA link

The 2023 Giv­ing What We Can Donor Lot­tery is now open

Luke Freeman23 Nov 2023 9:13 UTC
37 points
10 comments1 min readEA link

An­nounc­ing the 2019-20 Donor Lottery

SamDeere2 Dec 2019 13:56 UTC
52 points
8 comments2 min readEA link

Donor Lot­tery Debrief

TimothyTelleenLawton4 Aug 2020 20:58 UTC
129 points
17 comments5 min readEA link

Should donor lot­tery win­ners write re­ports?

rk22 Dec 2018 12:18 UTC
29 points
26 comments3 min readEA link

Don­ing with the devil

cole_haus15 Jun 2018 15:51 UTC
7 points
5 comments2 min readEA link

Alter­na­tives to donor lotteries

HaydnBelfield14 Feb 2021 18:02 UTC
27 points
15 comments6 min readEA link

Mildly Against Donor Lotteries

Jeff Kaufman1 Nov 2022 18:10 UTC
38 points
20 comments3 min readEA link
(www.jefftk.com)

Rea­sons why one might not give to a donor lottery

Tetraspace19 Aug 2021 20:01 UTC
19 points
1 comment7 min readEA link

Donor Lot­tery 2018 is live

JP Addison🔸6 Dec 2018 0:29 UTC
19 points
0 comments1 min readEA link
(app.effectivealtruism.org)

An­nounc­ing an up­dated draw­ing pro­to­col for the Effec­tiveAltru­ism.org donor lotteries

SamDeere24 Jan 2019 22:22 UTC
7 points
13 comments2 min readEA link

Donor lot­ter­ies: demon­stra­tion and FAQ

CarlShulman7 Dec 2016 13:07 UTC
42 points
33 comments10 min readEA link

An­nounc­ing the 2017 donor lottery

SamDeere16 Dec 2017 0:34 UTC
27 points
36 comments1 min readEA link

What would you do if you had half a mil­lion dol­lars?

Patrick17 Jul 2021 16:18 UTC
107 points
52 comments5 min readEA link

Donor lot­tery details

Paul_Christiano11 Jan 2017 0:52 UTC
21 points
9 comments2 min readEA link

Good Heart Dona­tion Lottery

Gordon Seidoh Worley1 Apr 2022 18:17 UTC
6 points
0 comments1 min readEA link
(www.lesswrong.com)

Rel­a­tive Im­pact of the First 10 EA Fo­rum Prize Winners

NunoSempere16 Mar 2021 17:11 UTC
88 points
35 comments18 min readEA link

When should EAs al­lo­cate fund­ing ran­domly? An in­con­clu­sive liter­a­ture re­view.

Max_Daniel17 Nov 2018 14:53 UTC
42 points
10 comments41 min readEA link

The 2021 EA Funds Donor Lot­tery is now open

SamDeere29 Nov 2021 19:08 UTC
37 points
3 comments2 min readEA link

When should you use lot­ter­ies?

Mati_Roy8 Dec 2020 18:07 UTC
11 points
0 comments3 min readEA link

The 2022 Giv­ing What We Can Donor Lot­tery is now open

Fabio Kuhn🔸25 Nov 2022 4:55 UTC
44 points
8 comments2 min readEA link

EA Funds and Donor Lot­tery this De­cem­ber: Quick Update

MarekDuda6 Dec 2018 0:50 UTC
25 points
3 comments1 min readEA link

Ex­plor­ing Dona­tion Parliaments

FC1 Sep 2022 18:07 UTC
25 points
2 comments4 min readEA link

Risk-neu­tral donors should plan to make bets at the mar­gin at least as well as giga-donors in expectation

CarlShulman31 Dec 2016 2:19 UTC
64 points
9 comments20 min readEA link
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