Incentives and the Design of Charitable Fundraisers: Lessons from a Field Experiment

Jeffrey Carpenter and Peter Matthews

No 8952, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: There has been little systematic study of the mechanisms typically used to raise money for charity. One of the most common is the simple raffle in which participants purchase chances to win a prize at a constant price. We conduct a field experiment randomly assigning participants to four raffle treatments to examine the effectiveness of alternative incentive schemes designed to encourage either participation or volume. Our results confirm the importance of incentives in that we find revenue gains are available on both margins. Our experiment, and others like it, illustrates the power of field experiments to inform fundraising choices.

Keywords: philanthropy; fundraising; incentives; public good; raffle; Tullock contest; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D03 D64 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
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