Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Steffen Altmann, Armin Falk, Paul Heidhues () and Rajshri Jayaraman ()
Additional contact information
Rajshri Jayaraman: European School of Management and Technology (ESMT)

No 8680, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to the primary donation decision, namely, how much to contribute to the charitable cause. The second relates to an "add-on" decision of how much to contribute to supporting the online platform itself. We find a strong impact of defaults on individual behavior: in each of our treatments, the modal positive contributions in both choice dimensions invariably correspond to the specified default amounts. Defaults, nevertheless, have no impact on aggregate donations. This is because defaults in the donation domain induce some people to donate more and others to donate less than they otherwise would have. In contrast, higher defaults in the secondary choice dimension unambiguously induce higher contributions to the online platform.

Keywords: default options; charitable giving; online platforms; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D03 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published - substantially revised version published in: Review of Economics and Statistics, 2019, 101 (5), 808-826

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8680.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2019)
Working Paper: Defaults and donations: Evidence from a field experiment (2018)
Working Paper: Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2014)
Working Paper: Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2014)
Working Paper: Defaults and Donations: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2014)
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:iza:izadps:dp8680

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().