How much, in USD, would M$100 go for if it could be freely bought and sold?
I'm curious the approximate monetary value of mana, given it can be bought for a dollar and donated to charity at the same rate, but not cashed out.
To resolve this, I will either devise an informal test to run, wait for one of you to do it for me, or resolve to the market probability at a random date and time in the week before the close date. Given that discretion, I will not be trading in this market.
See also:
Sep 22, 1:18pm: I've extended the close date by a week because I have my hands full working on a bot for the trading bot contest, so I want some extra time to figure out how to run an informal test on this. If this has been disruptive for anyone please let me know.
🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ26 | |
| 2 | Ṁ20 | |
| 3 | Ṁ17 | |
| 4 | Ṁ9 | |
| 5 | Ṁ4 |
I put off figuring out a way to test for this. (Particularly awkward because I was concerned any kind of open bidding for mana would be bad for Manifold's not-gambling status). Eventually enough time had passed that a test would no longer reflect the facts as they stood while the market was open. Sorry guys! Resolving to a semi-randomized market probability in accordance with the final possible resolution criterion I described.
@MichaelWheatley your random number is: 2
Salt: qNF9VZah5mnGIYtaor6R, round: 2874613 (signature 913887eafc7db46b5482c5ce6c0c4d334defa8c683967fd72710ee1dad6748b409f4f86a46574bd3533ea5a0e4dfaa1d1341add0f6f09db46dafaf80ccee28432ab6a8b27dcd68857251a6e6e63e070d464287026dfeebfd8d308c3996d9f4a3)
@MichaelWheatley you asked for a random integer between 1 and 14, inclusive. Coming up shortly!
Source: GitHub, previous round: 2874611 (latest), offset: 2, selected round: 2874613, salt: qNF9VZah5mnGIYtaor6R.
I don’t think it makes sense for EAs to buy mana for, say, 80¢ per M$100 from other users. If you donate that 80¢ to a charity, that’s usually a counterfactual donation (and maybe even tax advantaged). But if you buy M$100 from somebody else, there are two possibilities of what would have happened with that mana otherwise:
The mana gets donated anyway. Most donations on this platform are to pretty great organizations, so you just spent 80¢ to shuffle a dollars’ worth of donations from one charity to another charity. Not a lot of counterfactual impact!
The mana would never have been donated, so the company Manifold effectively saves a buck. You just spent 80¢ to make Manifold as a company donate a dollar. That’s leverage, but they got grants from EA-associated funds, so you kinda funging with that. Again, not very counterfactual.
@IsaacKing then DM me what price you bought it for if the sale goes through. I still need to figure out how to resolve this market.
You can save a human life by donating M$300 000 - M$500 000 to AMF. A human life is worth US$1 000 000 - US$10 000 000. Therefore M$100 is worth over US$200!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Malaria_Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
@MichaelWheatley No. Jamie did not even message me. This is weak evidence that the answer is above 0.7.
@dreev Counterpoint: mana is inherently more limited than dollars. I can do everything with dollars I can do with mana (aka buy mana or send to charity) - and moreover, if I send dollars to charity I get the benefit of tax deductions (which is not the case with mana).
A dollar can do everything M$100 can do, and much, much, MUCH more. If mana could be freely bought and sold on some secondary free market, the going price would almost certainly be less than the price Manifold asks.
@dreev The analogy I would use is gift cards. The resale value is less than a dollar because the moment you buy one you lose a lot of optionality.
@MichaelWheatley precisely. Mana is gift card currency that is purchased at face value and can then only be used for Manifold betting or charity donation.
@MichaelWheatley It's more like a food stamp that you can use to buy $1 worth of food anywhere. I already spend a significant portion of my USD income on food. If I use a stamp to buy food I would've bought anyways, I can effectively convert a food stamp into a dollar.
This is different from e.g. Steam gift cards because I spend a negligible fraction of my income on video games.
Since I spend 10% of my income on charity, it's closer to food stamps than to Steam gift cards. (Tax deductions complicate things a bit, but I don't think they lower the value that much)
@Yev Tax deductions would lower the value of mana commensurate to your effective tax rate. If your effective tax rate is 15%, you could spend $1 on a tax deductible contribution and save $0.15 in taxes, or you could spend $1 on mana to donate and lose that $0.15. In this situation, you're literally paying a premium to buy mana to donate, and should therefore never do it.
@MattP That makes sense. What do you think the relevant tax rate is for the (average? median?) manifold user?
Note that for those in the US, the charitable donation tax deduction only matters if you're itemizing deductions. Most (about 90%) of US households take the standard deduction, in which case you get the same value donating via Manifold vs to a tax-deductible charity. (In 2021 there was a special temporary allowance of $300 tax-deductible charitable donations even on the standard deduction, but that is gone in 2022.)
But if you are taking the itemized deduction, it can make a big difference! Just as an example, say you have a 30% marginal tax rate - then if you donate $100 your charity receives $100 and you pay $30 less in taxes, effectively meaning you donated $100 for only $70 cost; or equivalently you can donate $142 to charity for a cost of $100.
And also, if you normally take the standard deduction you may be able to "bunch" your donations that otherwise would have been across multiple years into one year to be able to take advantage of the itemized deduction.
An even more impactful optimization is if you have stocks or other securities that have grown a lot, you can donate them and neither you nor the charity has to pay the capital gains tax - which can create even bigger tax savings (which of course means you can donate more for the same cost)!
See https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rWpACQDv5GxgvDx9s/how-to-optimize-your-taxes-as-a-donor-in-the-us-donate for a guide on this topic.