EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Charity Auctions: A Field Experimental Investigation

Peter Matthews, Jeffrey Carpenter and Jessica Holmes ()

Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics

Abstract: Auctions are a popular way to raise money for charities, but relatively little is known, either theoretically or empirically, about the properties of charity auctions. The small theoretical literature suggests that the all-pay auction should garner more money than winner-pay auctions. We conduct field experiments to test which sealed bid format, first price, second price or all-pay raises the most money. Our experiment suggests that both the all-pay and second price formats are dominated by the first price auction. Our design also allows us to identify differential participation as the source of the difference between existing theory and the field. To conclude, we show that a model of charity auctions augmented by an endogenous participation decision predicts the revenue ordering that we see in the field.

Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2004-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.middlebury.edu/services/econ/repec/mdl/ancoec/0417.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Charity Auctions: A Field Experimental Investigation (2004) Downloads
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:mdl:mdlpap:0417

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vijaya Wunnava ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:mdl:mdlpap:0417