Motivational crowding out effects in charitable giving: Experimental evidence

Stephan Müller and Holger A. Rau

No 338, University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper tests motivational crowding out in the domain of charitable giving. A novelty is that our experiment isolates alternative explanations for the decline of giving such as strategic considerations of decision makers. Moreover, preference elicitation allows us to focus on the reaction of donors characterized by different degrees of intrinsic motivation. In the charitable-giving setting subjects donate money to the German "Red Cross" in two consecutive stages. The first dictator game is modified, i.e., donors face with equal probability an ex post reimbursement or a subsequent pay. The second game is a standard dictator game where we control for the decline of giving. We find that subjects with a high degree of intrinsic motivation, who received a reimbursement, reduce their donations more than four times as much as equally motivated individuals who did not experience a payment.

Keywords: Altruism; Dictator Game; Experiment; Motivational Crowd Out (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D02 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hpe and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cegedp:338

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