These mechanisms don’t only allow us to understand how to better work with others, but are also relevant to many global problems, which can be thought of as coordination failures.
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- [note::Global problems = Coordination failures
Similar to my assertion that climate change is an "information problem"]

We still face a great deal of uncertainty about these questions –many of which have seen little study– which also makes it one of the more intellectually interesting topics we write about.
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See this research proposal by Max Dalton and the Global Priority Institute’s research agenda
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Much of coordination is driven by trade — swaps that members of the community make with each other for mutual benefit. We’ll introduce four types of trade used to coordinate.
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Ignoring this responsiveness can cause you to have less impact in a number of ways.First, it can lead you to over or underestimate the impact of different actions.
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- [note::"It" = Single-player thinking]

Second, and more importantly, taking a single-player approach overlooks the possibility of trade.
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One option to achieve more coordination is to set up a ‘market.’ In a market, each individual has their own goals, but they make bids for what they want with other agents (often using a common set of institutions or intermediaries). This is how we organise much of society — for instance, buying and selling houses, food, and cars.
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So, much of this discussion about how to coordinate is about how to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma.
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- [note::How do non-profits focused on the same cause area overcome the prisoner's dilemma?]

If we generalise the prisoner’s dilemma to multiple groups, then we get a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ These also seem common, and in fact lie at the heart of many key global problems.For instance, it would be better for humanity at large if every country cut their carbon emissions to avoid the possibility of catastrophic climate change.However, from the perspective of each individual country, it’s better to defect — benefit from the cuts that other countries make, while gaining an economic edge.
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The key problem is that market prices can fail to reflect the prices that would be optimal from a social perspective due to “market failures”.For instance, some actions might create effects on third parties, which aren’t captured in prices — “externalities.” Or if one side has better information than another (“asymmetric information”), then people might refuse to trade due to fear of being exploited (the “lemon problem”).
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Likewise, people who start with the most currency get the most power to have their preferences satisfied. If you think everyone’s preferences count equally, this could lead to problems.
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Transaction costs tend to be low in large markets for simple goods (e.g. apples, pencils), but high for complex goods where it’s difficult to ascertain their quality, such as hiring someone to do research or management. In these cases, there can be large principal-agent problems. The basic idea is that the hiring manager (the “principal”) doesn’t have perfect oversight. So if there are even small differences in the aims of the person being hired (the “agent”) and the person who hired them, then the agent will typically do something quite different from what the principal would most want in order to further the agent’s own aims.
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- markets, hiring,

One way to avoid a prisoner’s dilemma is to give power to another entity that enforces coordination.
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In some coordination failures, a better outcome exists for everyone, but it requires everyone to switch to the better option at the same time. This is only possible in the presence of ‘common knowledge’ — each person knows that everyone else is going to take the better option.
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- [note::But how to incentivize knowledge sharing between actors (e.g. non-profits) who have similar, unopposed goals (e.g. ending factory farming), but ultimately vompete for funding?
Is it enough to simply setup a repository for people to contribute to? My impression is no - it has to be (1) easy to contribute to and (2) participation has clear benefits for all stakeholders]

Communities that coordinate have developed mechanisms to spread this knowledge in a trusted way.
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- knowledge transfer, coordination,
- [note::But what are those mechanisms and in what ways do those fail?]

In a community where you participate over time, you are essentially given the choice to cooperate or defect over and over again. The repeated nature of the game changes the situation significantly. Instead of defecting, (if reputation indeed spreads) it becomes better to earn a reputation for playing nice. This lets you cooperate with others, and do better over the long term.
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- [note::Participation in the EA community seems to have this same dynamic.]

Axelrod summed up the behaviour of the characteristics of the most successful algorithms as follows:7Be nice: cooperate, never be the first to defect.Be provocable: return defection for defection, cooperation for cooperation.Don’t be envious: focus on maximising your own ‘score,’ as opposed to ensuring your score is higher than your partners’.Don’t be too clever: or, don’t try to be tricky. Clarity is essential for others to cooperate with you.
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We call one of these mechanisms ‘preemptive trade.’ In a preemptive trade, if you see an opportunity to benefit another community member at little cost to yourself, you take it. The hope is that they will return the favour in the future. This allows more trades to take place, since the trade can still go ahead even when the person isn’t able to pay it back immediately and when you’re not sure it will be returned. Instead the hope is that if you do lots of favours, on average you’ll get more back than you put in.
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- [note::Pre-emptive trade = Doing favors for others in hoping that they will do favors for you in the future
e.g. Sending resources/opportunities to people in your professional network]

Going one level further, we get ‘indirect trade.’ For instance, in some professional networks, people try to follow the norm of ‘paying it forward.’ Junior members get mentoring from senior members, without giving the senior members anything in return. Instead, the junior members are expected to mentor the next generation of junior members. This creates a chain of mentoring from generation to generation. The result is that each generation gets the mentoring they need, but aid is never directly exchanged.
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- [note::Indirect trade = Doing favors for others, so they can do favors for others
Trade that occurs within a community as opposed to between pairs]

we can see that pre-emptive and indirect trade can only exist in the presence of a significant amount of trust. Normal markets require trust to function, because participants can worry about getting cheated, but ultimately people make explicit bargains that are relatively easy to verify. With indirect trade, however, you need to trust that each person you help will go on to help others in the future, which is much harder to check up on.
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Pre-emptive and indirect trade can also only exist when each member expects to gain more from the network in the long-term than they put in, which could be why professional networks tend to involve people of roughly similar ability and influence.
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However, what about if the agents also care about each others’ wellbeing, or share a common goal? We call these ‘shared aims’ communities. The effective altruism community is an example, because at least to some degree, everyone in the community cares about the common goal of social impact, and our definitions of this overlap to some degree. Likewise, environmentalists want to protect the environment, feminists want to promote women’s rights, and so on. How might cooperation be different in these cases?This is a question that has received little research. Most research on coordination in economics, game theory and computer science, has focused on selfish agents. Our speculation, however, is that shared aims communities have the potential to achieve a significantly greater degree of cooperation.
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- [note::Woah! "This question has received very little research" - this indicates that I might be able to feasibly contribute to this field, as it hasn't necessarily been explored in great depth (at least according to the author's perspective in 2018).]

We could call trade when nothing is given in return ‘trade plus’ or ‘trade+.’ It’s even more extreme than indirect trade, since it’s worth helping people even if you never expect anyone else in the community to give you anything in return.
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trade+ can only operate in the presence of a large degree of trust. Each community member needs to believe that the others sincerely share the aims to a large enough degree. The more aligned you are with other community members, the more trade+ you can do.
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shared aims communities should also in theory be the most resistant to coordination failures.
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- [note::Yes and no - yes, the incentives to coordinate are greater than communities who don't share goals, but if there isn't a system/tool that facilitates effective coordination, it's generally difficult to avoid coordination failures. Whether or not you "fail" really depends on what you considered a "failure." In my model of the world, most shared aim communities are failing at coordination, despite their best efforts and the vast amount of technology available. What I want to figure out is the best interventions for solving these challenges.]

we’ve sketched three types of community:Single-player communities — where other people’s actions are (mostly) treated as fixed, and the benefits of coordination are mainly ignored.Market communities — which use markets and price signals to facilitate trade, but are still vulnerable to market failures and coordination failures.Shared aims communities — where members share a common goal, potentially allowing for trade+ and even more resilience to coordination failures, which may allow for the greatest degree of coordination.
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- [note::What other types of communities might have coordination problems?]

When you’re part of a community, there’s an analogous concept: the ability of the community to achieve an impact in the future, which we call ‘community capital.’
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Community capital = (Sum of individual career capital) * (Coordination ability)
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- [note::This seems like a useful framework. I want to increase coordination ability to increase community capital (and thus, capacity for impact)]

When coordinating, increasing community capital can become a key goal. Individuals can increase community capital by:Increasing its (quality-adjusted) membership.Increasing norm following.Improving community infrastructure.Improving reputation.
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As another example, the community may already be short of historians, who could study issues like the history of philanthropy, the history of welfare, and the history of social movements. In the long-term, we’ll want almost every academic discipline involved.
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What’s more, becoming a trusted community member who’s fully up to speed can easily take several years, and this makes it harder than it looks to absorb new specialists. It also seems like we’re going to need a lot of specialists, at least in certain areas and skills.
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- [note::YES]

The amount of coordination that’s possible depends on how effective the community’s infrastructure and norms are, and how well aligned you are with its aims.
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- favorite, coordination, collaboration,