Expressive negotiation over donations to charities

When donating money to a (say, charitable) cause, it is possible to use the contemplated donation as negotiating material 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 donator 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 would have made all parties (donators as well as charities) better off cannot be expressed in terms of matching oï¬...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Vincent Conitzer, Tuomas Sandholm
• Keywords: Clearing Problem, Concave Bids, Multiple Charities, SIGECOM 2004