Choosing your object of benevolence: a field experiment on donation options

Bodo Aretz and Sebastian Kube

No 10-016, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research

Abstract: In a large natural field experiment, we explore the effect of providing donors with the opportunity to choose the target country for their donations. We find that only a small fraction of donors use the option, which might reflect a reluctance to consider tradeoffs when those concern important, 'protected', values. However, those donors who choose their object of benevolence give significantly more, even when controlling for their donation history. In view of the latest research on identifable-victim effects, our findings underline that less inclusive targets can evoke more intense feelings than more inclusive ones stressing that altruistic motivation seems to be mediated by aroused empathetic emotions. --

Keywords: charitable giving; identifiable victim; field experiment; altruism; contingent valuation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 C93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-soc
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/30201/1/622683632.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:zewdip:10016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ZBW - German National Library of Economics ().