Raising Revenues for Charity: Auctions versus Lotteries

Douglas Davis, Laura Razzolini (), Robert Reilly and Bart Wilson

No 301, Working Papers from VCU School of Business, Department of Economics

Abstract: We report an experiment conducted to gain insight into factors that may affect revenues in English auctions and lotteries, two commonly used charity fund-raising formats. In particular, we examine how changes in the marginal per capita return (MPCR) from the public component of bidding, and how changes in the distribution of values affect the revenue properties of each format. Although we observe some predicted comparative static effects, the dominant result is that lottery revenues uniformly exceed English auction revenues. The similarity of lottery and English auction bids across sales formats appears to drive the excess lottery revenues.

Keywords: auctions; lotteries; charitable giving; experimental tests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D44 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2003-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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http://www.people.vcu.edu/~lrazzolini/drrw1003.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Raising Revenues for Charity: Auctions Versus Lotteries (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vcu:wpaper:0301

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