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Dimensions of donation preferences: the structure of peer and income effects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
Charitable donations provide positive externalities and can potentially be increased with an understanding of donor preferences. We obtain a uniquely comprehensive characterization of donation motives using an experiment that varies treatments between and within subjects. Donations are increasing in peers’ donations and past subjects’ donations. These and other results suggest a model of heterogeneous beliefs about the social norm for giving. Estimation of such a model reveals substantial heterogeneity in subjects’ beliefs about and adherence to the norm. A simple fundraising strategy increases donations by an estimated 30% by exploiting previously unstudied correlations between dimensions of donor preferences.
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- Copyright © 2020 Economic Science Association
Footnotes
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-020-09661-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
We are grateful to the Birmingham–Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement, and Education for research support. We thank Masaki Aoyagi, Antonio Cabrales, Gary Charness, Tongzhe Li, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, Michael Price, Aldo Rustichini, Kimberley Scharf, and seminar participants at the University of Illinois, the University of Southern California, the University of Windsor, the 2017 Annual Conference of the International Institute for Public Finance, the 2017 Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, Behavioral Exchange 2017, the 2017 Nordic Conference on Behavioural and Experimental Economics, the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Southern Economic Association, and the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association for helpful comments. Yuci Chen provided excellent research assistance.