Expressive markets for donating to charities Original Research Article

When donating money to a (say, charitable) cause, it is possible to use the contemplated donation as a bargaining chip to induce other parties interested in the charity to donate more. Such negotiation is usually done in terms of matching offers, where one party promises to pay a certain amount if others pay a certain amount. However, in their current form, matching offers allow for only limited negotiation. For one, it is not immediately clear how multiple parties can make matching offers at the same time without creating circular dependencies. Also, it is not immediately clear how to make a donation conditional on other donations to multiple charities when the donor has different levels of appreciation for the different charities. In both these cases, the limited expressiveness of matching offers causes economic loss: it may happen that an arrangement that all parties (donors as well as charities) would have preferred cannot be expressed in terms of matching offers and will therefore not occur.