Doing good with other people’s money: an experiment on people's (un)willingness to grant others the freedom to choose

Fredrik Carlsson, Mitesh Kataria (), Elina Lampi and Maria Levati

No 08/2015, Working Papers from University of Verona, Department of Economics

Abstract: We augment a standard allocation experiment to investigate how preferences for an environmental project relate to the willingness to limit others' choices. We ask the allocator to choose his own donation level, a donation level for him and his group, and the minimum donation level for the group members (excluding the allocator). We find that donations dictated to the whole group are, on average, lower than individual donations and that this decrease is consistent with the expectations of what others would like to donate. Moreover, most allocators force the others to donate a positive, though low, amount. Thus, unlimited freedom of choice is rejected by the majority of the subjects.

Keywords: Allocation decisions; Charitable giving; Social preferences; Freedom of choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D64 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-hpe, nep-res and nep-soc
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Published in WP 8/2015

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ver:wpaper:08/2015

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