 Charitable Giving by the Poor: A Field Experiment in KyrgyzstanMaja Adena, Rustamdjan Hakimov and Steffen Huck Management Science, 2024, vol. 70, issue 1, 633-646 Abstract: In a large-scale natural field experiment, we partnered with a microlending company in Kyrgyzstan that asked over 180,000 of its clients for donations to social projects as a form of corporate philanthropy. In a 2 × 2 design, we explored two main (preregistered) hypotheses about giving by the poor. First, based on a conjecture that the poor are more price sensitive than the rich and in contrast to previous studies, we hypothesize that matching incentives induce crowding in of out-of-pocket donations. Second, we hypothesize that our population cares about their proximity to the charitable project. We find evidence in favor of the former hypothesis but not the latter. Previous studies of charitable giving focus on middle- or high-income earners in Western countries, neglecting the poor, although the lowest-income groups are often shown to contribute substantial shares of their income to charitable causes. Our results challenge the evidence in the extant literature but are in line with our theoretical model. The implications for fundraising managers are that the optimal design of fundraising campaigns crucially depends on the targeted groups and that donation matching is successful in stimulating participation in poorer populations. Keywords: charitable giving; field experiments; matching donations (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:70:y:2024:i:1:p:633-646 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.