"Facta Non Verba": an experiment on pledging and giving

Angela Sutan, Gilles Grolleau (), Guillermo Mateu and Radu Vranceanu
Additional contact information
Guillermo Mateu: BSB - Burgundy School of Business (BSB) - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Dijon Bourgogne (ESC)

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We design an experiment to investigate whether asking people to state how much they will donate to a charity (i.e., to pledge) increases their actual donation. Individuals' endowment is either certain or a random variable. We study different types of pledges, namely, private, public and irrevocable, which differ in terms of the cost to the individual for not keeping the promise. We show that in absence of endowment uncertainty, private and public pledges are associated with lower donations as compared to donations in the no-pledge case: private pledges slightly reduce donations and public pledges reduce them more significantly. Donations increase with uncertainty (in terms of increased endowment dispersion) for both private and public pledge situations, although donations with private pledges remain higher than donations with public pledge.

Keywords: charitable giving; commitment; dictator game; experiments; pledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Journal of Economic Psychology, 2018, 65, pp.1-15. ⟨10.1016/j.joep.2018.01.006⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: “Facta non verba”: An experiment on pledging and giving (2018)
Working Paper: " Facta non verba ": an experiment on pledging and giving (2015)
Working Paper: "Facta non verba": an experiment on pledging and giving (2015)
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:hal:journl:hal-01992416

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2018.01.006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().