Charity Begins at Home: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on Charitable Giving

Catherine Eckel, Benjamin A. Priday and Rick K. Wilson
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Benjamin A. Priday: Department of Economics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA
Rick K. Wilson: Department of Political Science, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA

Games, 2018, vol. 9, issue 4, 1-22

Abstract: Charities operate at different levels: national, state, or local. We test the effect of the level of the organization on charitable giving in a sample of adults in two Texas communities. Subjects make four charitable giving “dictator game” decisions from a fixed amount of money provided by the experimenter. Three decisions target different charitable organizations, all of which have a disaster-relief mission, but differ in the level of operation. The fourth targets an individual recipient, identified by the local fire department as a victim of a fire. One of the four is selected randomly for payment. Giving is significantly higher to national and local organizations compared to state. We find a higher propensity to donate and larger amount donated to the individual relative to all organizations. Subsequent analysis compares a number of demographic and attitudinal covariates with donations to specific charities. In a second decision, subjects instead indicate which of their four prior decisions they would most prefer to implement. Here we see that a majority of subjects prefer the gift to the individual.

Keywords: charitable giving; comparative dictator game; lab-in-the-field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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