Self-Signaling and Prosocial Behavior: a Cause Marketing Mobile Field Experiment

Jean-Pierre Dubé, Xueming Luo and Zheng Fang

No 21475, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We empirically test an information economics based theory of social preferences in which ego utility and self-signaling can potentially crowd out the effect of consumption utility on choices. Two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments involving a consumer good and charitable donations are conducted using a subject pool of actual consumers. We find that bundling relatively large charitable donations with a consumer good can generate non-monotonic regions of demand. Consumers also self-report significantly lower ratings of “feeling good about themselves” when a large donation is bundled with a large price discount for the good. The combined evidence supports the self-signaling theory whereby price discounts crowd out a consumer’s self-inference of altruism from buying a good bundled with a charitable donation. Alternative theories of motivation crowding are unable to fit the non-monotonic moments in the data. A structural model of self-signaling is fit to the data to quantify the economic magnitude of ego utility and its role in driving consumer decisions.

JEL-codes: C7 C72 C9 C93 D03 D11 D12 D8 D81 M3 M30 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ger, nep-mkt and nep-upt
Note: IO
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Self-Signaling and Prosocial Behavior: A Cause Marketing Experiment Jean-Pierre Dubé, Xueming Luo, and Zheng Fang Marketing Science 201736:2 , 161-186

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