What is Giving Compass?
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Our cost-effectiveness analyses are an important input into our charity recommendations. We view cost-effectiveness analyses as valuable for helping us identify large differences in the cost-effectiveness of organizations we're considering for a recommendation and to encourage staff to think through relevant issues related to charities' work. However, although we spend significant staff time on our cost-effectiveness analyses, we consider our cost-effectiveness numbers to be extremely rough and to include subjective inputs as well as value judgments. We do not make charity recommendations solely on the basis of cost-effectiveness calculations and will rely more heavily on other factors, such as an organization's track record, when we are comparing organizations with cost-effectiveness estimates that are not very different.
The model relies on individuals' philosophical values—for example, how to weigh increasing a person's income relative to averting a death—and difficult judgment calls about which we have limited information, such as the likelihood that a program as it is implemented will have the same impact as the program when it was studied. We have published the values and judgments inputted by individuals who have worked on GiveWell's research and use an aggregate of these values and judgments to arrive at our best guess of the cost-effectiveness of each program. We encourage those who are interested to make a copy of the model with the link below and edit it with their own inputs.