I don’t think just shared knowledge is sufficient (e.g. advertising is not about giving you information), and if you invoke Aumann and add the shared values requirement, don’t you end up in a situation where everyone is basically the same? You get a hive-mind kind of a society...
Advertising (in which I include matching schemes and other attempts to influence donors) is either:
1) dark arts, at best orthogonal to a charity’s mission, at worst contrary to it (if the mission includes raising the sanity waterline).
2) providing information, possibly in order to gather information (i.e. letting donors know how to communicated, not just give).
Benquo’s “good arbitrage” seemed to be saying that #2 is desirable, and I don’t fully understand the argument. If he’s making the argument from crowdsourcing preferences, then that does lead toward a view that there is a “right” answer which we’re trying to discover from the hive-mind.
As far as I can understand Benquo’s arbitrage argument, it relies on the donor being able to forecast the effectiveness of the program better than the charity itself can. And if you assume the charity and the donor follow the same goal, it makes sense to defer the decision to the better prognosticator.
I don’t think just shared knowledge is sufficient (e.g. advertising is not about giving you information), and if you invoke Aumann and add the shared values requirement, don’t you end up in a situation where everyone is basically the same? You get a hive-mind kind of a society...
Advertising (in which I include matching schemes and other attempts to influence donors) is either: 1) dark arts, at best orthogonal to a charity’s mission, at worst contrary to it (if the mission includes raising the sanity waterline). 2) providing information, possibly in order to gather information (i.e. letting donors know how to communicated, not just give).
Benquo’s “good arbitrage” seemed to be saying that #2 is desirable, and I don’t fully understand the argument. If he’s making the argument from crowdsourcing preferences, then that does lead toward a view that there is a “right” answer which we’re trying to discover from the hive-mind.
As far as I can understand Benquo’s arbitrage argument, it relies on the donor being able to forecast the effectiveness of the program better than the charity itself can. And if you assume the charity and the donor follow the same goal, it makes sense to defer the decision to the better prognosticator.