Building the first rigorous before-and-after test, through research, instrumented acquisitions, and pre-registered measurement.
When customers, employees, suppliers, media, and other stakeholders can see that profits flow to charity rather than to private shareholders, documented preferences activate — improving demand, hiring, retention, supplier relations, and earned media.
The effects need not be dramatic. Most businesses operate on thin margins, where even modest input changes compound into large profit effects. A few percentage points of better customer acquisition, lower employee turnover, and stronger supplier terms can stack across the P&L into outsized profit gains.
higher sale probability Charity-linked eBay listings were ~10 percentage points more likely to sell than matched non-charity listings — a ~30% lift over the baseline sale rate. (Elfenbein, Fisman & McManus 2012.)
more applications, less turnover Mission-aligned job signals raised applications 25% — equivalent to a 36% wage increase — and reduced turnover by 6–8% in a 1.6M-employee natural experiment. (Hedblom et al. 2019; Rice & Schiller 2023.)
lower default rates Foundation-controlled firms default 36% less often than peers — and pay 7 basis points less on syndicated loans. (Buchanan & Kaya 2024, 411 listed firms.)
at parity / with a 9% premium Fair-trade coffee sales rose ~10% at price parity in a multi-store field experiment — but a 9% premium on the lower-priced blend reversed the gain to a ~30% sales decline. (Hainmueller, Hiscox & Sequeira 2015.)
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. Featured pieces appear as cards on the homepage; the archive lives on a separate page accessible from this section.
(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.
(December 2025)
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.
A 12-minute introduction to the Profit for Good model and the case for businesses whose profits permanently flow to effective charities, the foundational public articulation of the ideas Project COA is now testing rigorously.
