Why Do People Give? Testing Pure and Impure Altruism

Mark Wilhelm, Lise Vesterlund and Huan Xie

No 20497, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The extant experimental design to investigate warm glow and altruism elicits a single measure of crowd-out. Not recognizing that impure altruism predicts crowd-out is a function of giving-by-others, this design's power to reject pure altruism varies with the level of giving-by-others, and it cannot identify the strength of warm glow and altruism preferences. These limitations are addressed with a new design that elicits crowd-out at a low and at a high level of giving-by-others. Consistent with impure altruism we find decreasing crowd-out as giving-by-others increases. However warm glow is weak in our experiment and altruism largely explains why people give.

JEL-codes: C92 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-soc
Note: PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published as Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm & Lise Vesterlund & Huan Xie, 2017. "Why Do People Give? Testing Pure and Impure Altruism," American Economic Review, vol 107(11), pages 3617-3633.

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Journal Article: Why Do People Give? Testing Pure and Impure Altruism (2017)
Working Paper: Why Do People Give? Testing Pure and Impure Altruism (2014)
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