3 ms·

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that most charities experience diminishing marginal utility for each dollar received after some point. Therefore if people g

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that most charities experience diminishing marginal utility for each dollar received after some point. Therefore if people give too much to a single charity, it's rank will fall. If there is not diminishing utility, you would have a utility monster[1], which would cause the problem you pointed out. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

gatheredprior 8y ago
> I suspect, but don't know for sure, that most charities experience diminishing marginal utility for each dollar received after some point. This is absolutely true. If you're a charity and your primary activity is distributing anti-malarial bed nets, once you have enough bed nets to meet demand, your going to have to move on to other activities that won't necessarily be exactly as effective as the bed nets. In a contrived thought experiment with "perfect" information about the effectiveness of activities, EA would suggest a "Greedy" (algorithm) style of allocation. For each incoming dollar, you send it to whichever activity has the greatest utility per dollar give, and repeat that for as many dollars as you have.