Peer effects in charitable giving: Evidence from the (running) field

Sarah Smith, Frank Windmeijer and Edmund Wright ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: There is a widespread belief that peer effects are important in charitable giving, but surprisingly little evidence on how donors respond to their peers in practice. Analysing a unique dataset of donations to online fundraising pages, we show that peer effects are positive and sizeable: a £10 increase in the mean of past donations increases giving by £2.50, on average. We show that donations respond to large and small donations and to changes in the mode. We find little evidence that donations signal charity quality – our preferred explanation is that donors use information on (the distribution of) earlier donations to decide what is appropriate for them to give.

Keywords: charitable giving; peer effects; donations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2013-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2013/wp302.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2013/wp302.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2013/wp302.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Peer Effects in Charitable Giving: Evidence from the (Running) Field (2015)
Working Paper: Peer effects in charitable giving: Evidence from the (running) field (2012)
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:bri:cmpowp:13/302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().