(Un)Informed charitable giving

Silvana Krasteva and Huseyin Yildirim

Journal of Public Economics, 2013, vol. 106, issue C, 14-26

Abstract: Evidence suggests little informed giving. To understand this behavior, we examine voluntary provision of a discrete public good with independent private values that can be ascertained at a cost. We find that an individual who considers a smaller contribution is less likely to learn her value, and thus the percentage of informed giving diminishes as the population grows. We also find that a direct grant to the charity exacerbates crowding-out by discouraging information acquisition whereas a matching grant increases donations by encouraging it. We further show that with costly information, a (first-order) stochastic increase in values can decrease donations; and that facilitating private acquisition of information can be a better fund-raising strategy than directly supplying it.

Keywords: Charitable giving; Value of information; Crowding-out (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 D83 H00 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272713001357
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:106:y:2013:i:c:p:14-26

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2013.06.011

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().