Toward an understanding of the economics of charity: Evidence from a field experiment

Craig Landry, Andreas Lange, John List, Michael Price and Nicholas Rupp

Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: This study develops theory and uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to explore the economics of charity. We approached nearly 5000 households, randomly divided into four experimental treatments, to shed light on key issues on the demand side of charitable fundraising. Empirical results are in line with our theory: in gross terms, our lottery treatments raised considerably more money than our voluntary contributions treatments. Interestingly, we find that a one standard deviation increase in female solicitor physical attractiveness is similar to that of the lottery incentive--the magnitude of the estimated difference in gifts is roughly equivalent to the treatment effect of moving from our theoretically most attractive approach (lotteries) to our least attractive approach (voluntary contributions).

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (239)

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00292.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Toward an Understanding of the Economics of Charity: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2006)
Working Paper: Toward an Understanding of the Economics of Charity: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2005)
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:feb:natura:00292

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().