We are preparing the first before-and-after test to isolate the charitable ownership advantage (COA), our conviction that the same business is worth more under charitable ownership.
We are preparing the first before-and-after test to isolate the charitable ownership advantage (COA) – our conviction that the same business is worth more under charitable ownership.
Our thesis is that when you take a business with certain characteristics, bring it into charitable ownership, keep the operations as consistent as possible with how they were before (‘business as usual’), profits increase because of stakeholder preference. We expect that consumers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders prefer to do business when the profits flow to good causes rather than private investors, as per conventional ownership.
Imagine: nothing else changes, only the ownership. The quality, price, logistics, and all other factors that might influence stakeholder selection remain the same as before.
Project COA exists to investigate whether the thesis holds when applied to real businesses, and to publish the results, whatever they show.
Charity-linked eBay listings were more likely to sell than otherwise identical non-charity listings. Fair Trade-labelled coffee also sold more at price parity, although the effect reversed when buyers faced a meaningful price premium.
(Elfenbein, Fisman & McManus, 2012; Hainmueller, Hiscox & Sequeira, 2015)
Mission-oriented job framing attracted more applicants. Other research suggests that stronger mission alignment can also reduce employee turnover.
(Hedblom, Hickman & List, 2019; Rice & Schiller, 2023)
Foundation-controlled firms had lower estimated default probabilities, higher credit ratings, fewer covenants, less collateral and longer loan maturities than matched firms.
(Buchanan & Kaya, 2024)
These are analog and exemplar findings, not yet direct PFG90+ portfolio results. They are the proof stack that justifies the acquisition-led test. Project COA is designed to produce the missing controlled evidence: audited before-and-after conversions of mature profitable businesses.
For readers who want to inspect the written case in full, the publications below trace the thesis from its earliest formulation to its current articulation.
(January 2026)
The thesis statement: the same business is worth more under charitable ownership than under conventional ownership, and for that not to be true, something genuinely strange would have to be happening between documented stakeholder preferences and market behavior.
(September 2025)
Philanthropists and the everyday economic decisions of the rest of the world are structurally aligned — and the alliance, once activated, could redirect a substantial share of global business profit toward solving humanity’s most pressing problems.
(May 2026)
A synthesis of the empirical evidence for the Charitable Ownership Advantage across consumer behavior, employee decisions, supplier relations, institutional procurement, capital markets, and earned media — drawing on field experiments, real labor market data, and verified Profit for Good companies operating at scale.
An introduction to the Profit for Good model and the case for businesses whose profits permanently flow to charity. Project COA is now looking to test these ideas via our first business acquisition.
