Distribution of cost-effectiveness

Caviola, Lucius et al. (2020) Donors vastly underestimate differences in charities' effectiveness, Judgment and Decision Making , vol. 15, pp. 509–516.
Shows that lay people estimate that the variation in charity cost-effectiveness is muted,limited, whereas experts estimate them to be much larger.

Daniel, Max (2020) Collection of existing material on 'impact being heavy-tailed', Effective Altruism Forum, June 26.
An annotated bibliography of writings related to the distribution of cost-effectiveness.

Not all causes are equally cost-effective. In fact, the distribution of cost-effectiveness is heavy-tailed: some causes are thousands of times more cost-effective than others.