Blood Donations and Incentives: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Lorenz Goette () and Alois Stutzer ()

No 3580, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: There is a longstanding concern that material incentives might undermine prosocial motivation, leading to a decrease in blood donations rather than an increase. This paper provides an empirical test of how material incentives affect blood donations in a large-scale field experiment spanning three months and involving more than 10,000 previous donors. We examine two types of incentive: a lottery ticket and a free cholesterol test. Lottery tickets significantly increase donations, in particular among less motivated donors. The cholesterol test leads to no discernable impact on usable blood donations. If anything, it creates a small negative selection effect in terms of donations that must be discarded.

Keywords: prosocial behavior; blood donations; material incentives; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D64 H41 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-07
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3580.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Blood donations and incentives: evidence from a field experiment (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3580

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().