Relational Altruism and Giving in Social Groups
Kimberley Scharf and
Sarah Smith
No 5952, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo
Abstract:
Much fundraising is done by individuals within existing social groups. Exploiting a unique dataset, we demonstrate (i) a positive relationship between social group size and the number of donations; (ii) a negative relationship between group size and the size of individual donations; (iii) no clear relationship between group size and the total amount raised. Free riding with respect to the activity being funded cannot explain the relationship between group size and donation size, since the number of social group members is only a subset of total contributors. Instead, the findings are consistent with the notion that giving in social groups is motivated by “relational altruism”.
Keywords: online giving; fundraising; social groups; donations; charity; altruism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 H31 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5952.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Relational altruism and giving in social groups (2016) 
Working Paper: Relational Altruism and Giving in Social Groups (2016) 
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:ces:ceswps:_5952
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().