Donors Change Both Their Level and Pattern of Giving in Response to Contests among Charities

Cary Deck () and James Murphy

No 2018-06, Working Papers from University of Alaska Anchorage, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper examines two previously unexplored techniques for increasing charitable giving, both motivated by the contest literature. One is a fixed bonus that is paid to the organization receiving the most donations, akin to an all-pay auction. The other is a raffle-based bonus, akin to a Tullock contest. These two techniques are compared to a one-to-one matching program and a baseline condition in a within-subject laboratory experiment. The results reveal that all three bonus techniques lead to similar increases in donations to organizations eligible for the promotion. However, when only some organizations are eligible, the increases in giving to eligible organizations are primarily driven by a reallocation of donations away from ineligible organizations.

Keywords: experimental economics; Charitable Giving; Contests; All-pay Auction; Donation Matching; Laboratory Experiment; philanthropy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 D6 D7 D9 H4 L3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in European Economic Review. 112:91-106

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econpapers.uaa.alaska.edu/RePEC/ala/wpaper/ALA201806.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Donors change both their level and pattern of giving in response to contests among charities (2019)
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:ala:wpaper:2018-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Alaska Anchorage, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Alevy ().