Another genre of prize is simply “making things go well”.
Here’s a Rolling Hindsight prize. Say we want to incentivise making things go well in years k = 1, …, 10. That is, 2027 to 2037. We will judge this across ten hindsight lags l = 1, …, 10. So each pair (k, l) gets its own prize: in year n = k + l, a jury awards ten million dollars for whoever most made things go well in year k, or splits the prize appropriately across projects. Every contribution year k is thus judged ten times by ten successive juries. Payouts begin in year 2, peak in year 11, and end in year 20, exhausting the fund exactly. Total cost $1B.
The whole game here is picking the juries and getting them to describe what they would count as making things go well. If the jurists are sufficiently famous or have public writings then this might also work.
Yeah I think something like this could be good, my preferred version is probably to wait longer to have ASI juries pay out retrospective rewards after we know how things have gone and who contributed most usefully. But this doesn't tell people what to work on (for better or worse), just 'do good things'. Which may still be useful if people are tempted to e.g. pursue selfish goals like just getting rich during the key period rather than doing what they can to help out. If the retrospective rewards were large enough, that could be the optimal way to make money, if one is fairly risk neutral.
> If investment returns are very high, paying out on a prize later is far preferable to paying up-front grants. This could easily be a >2x multiplier.
This is only true if the prize funder expects more ROI than the prize seeker expects. If everyone is getting 100% returns then the prize seeker values a £1m prize today as much as a £2m prize in a year.
Yeah I expect philanthropists will generally get far better returns than grant recipients, due to having access to far better investment opportunities, more risk tolerance and sophistication, etc.
Another genre of prize is simply “making things go well”.
Here’s a Rolling Hindsight prize. Say we want to incentivise making things go well in years k = 1, …, 10. That is, 2027 to 2037. We will judge this across ten hindsight lags l = 1, …, 10. So each pair (k, l) gets its own prize: in year n = k + l, a jury awards ten million dollars for whoever most made things go well in year k, or splits the prize appropriately across projects. Every contribution year k is thus judged ten times by ten successive juries. Payouts begin in year 2, peak in year 11, and end in year 20, exhausting the fund exactly. Total cost $1B.
The whole game here is picking the juries and getting them to describe what they would count as making things go well. If the jurists are sufficiently famous or have public writings then this might also work.
Yeah I think something like this could be good, my preferred version is probably to wait longer to have ASI juries pay out retrospective rewards after we know how things have gone and who contributed most usefully. But this doesn't tell people what to work on (for better or worse), just 'do good things'. Which may still be useful if people are tempted to e.g. pursue selfish goals like just getting rich during the key period rather than doing what they can to help out. If the retrospective rewards were large enough, that could be the optimal way to make money, if one is fairly risk neutral.
> If investment returns are very high, paying out on a prize later is far preferable to paying up-front grants. This could easily be a >2x multiplier.
This is only true if the prize funder expects more ROI than the prize seeker expects. If everyone is getting 100% returns then the prize seeker values a £1m prize today as much as a £2m prize in a year.
Yeah I expect philanthropists will generally get far better returns than grant recipients, due to having access to far better investment opportunities, more risk tolerance and sophistication, etc.