Shared Social Responsibility: A Field Experiment in Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Charitable Giving

We report a series of experimental studies that investigate the influence of a competition on noncompetitors who do not participate in it but are aware of it. Our work is highly relevant across many domains of social life where competitions are prevalent, as it is typical in a competition that the competitors are far outnumbered by these noncompetitors. In our field experiment involving pay-what-you-want entrance at a German zoo (n = 22,886), customers who were aware of a competition over entrance payments, but did not participate in it, paid more than customers who were unaware of the competition. Further experiments provide confirmatory and process evidence for this contagion effect, showing that it is driven by heightened social comparison motivation due to mere awareness of the competition. Moreover, we find evidence that the reward level for the competitors could moderate the contagion effect on the noncompetitors. Even if an individual does not participate in a competition, their behavior can still be influenced by it, and this influence can change with the characteristics of the competition in an intriguing way.

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A Field Experiment on Group Competition and Charitable Giving (II)

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials ◽

10.1257/rct.7962-1.0 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Christoph Oslislo

Keyword(s):

Field Experiment ◽

Charitable Giving ◽

Group Competition

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The Business of Business Is Business: How Businesses Serve Society

10.1093/oso/9780190076559.003.0002 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 13-29

Author(s):

Jason Brennan ◽

William English ◽

John Hasnas ◽

Peter Jaworski

Keyword(s):

Corporate Social Responsibility ◽

Social Responsibility ◽

Division Of Labor ◽

Charitable Giving ◽

Business People ◽

Core Service ◽

Democratic Societies ◽

Corporate Social

There is a division of labor in modern democratic societies. The main way businesses serve society is by producing products and services people want at prices they can afford to pay. A good business exercises corporate social responsibility simply by delivering its core service. There is a role for charitable giving and other causes, but having a well-crafted corporate social responsibility campaign is no substitute for ethics. Indeed, one of the dangers of the focus on corporate social responsibility is that business people might rationalize that unethical ways of making money are acceptable because the business later donates time or money to “good causes.” But ethics is primarily about how a business makes money, not what it does with the money it makes.

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Testing donation menus: on charitable giving for cancer research – evidence from a natural field experiment

Behavioural Public Policy ◽

10.1017/bpp.2019.13 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-22

Author(s):

MARIANNA BAGGIO ◽

MATTEO MOTTERLINI

Keyword(s):

Cancer Research ◽

Field Experiment ◽

Charitable Giving ◽

Research Evidence ◽

Low Frequency ◽

Behavioral Responses ◽

Average Amount ◽

Charitable Behavior ◽

Natural Field Experiment ◽

The Given

AbstractBehavioral economics research has helped with understanding charitable behavior and has shown that charities can encourage donations by carefully designing their pledges. However, there is still scope to extend current research on who gives, what drives the decision to donate and at what levels, especially when behavioral insights are applied in context. In cooperation with a major Italian charity for cancer research, this study implements a natural direct mail field experiment, with over 150,000 letters sent to donors. By exploring the behavioral responses to different donation anchors, evidence was found that, within the given framework, including donation menus significantly increased the average amount donated without affecting the likelihood of donation. Furthermore, introducing additional explanations of how to make a payment significantly increased overall returns. Lastly, individual heterogeneity (high- and low-frequency donors, as well as senior and junior donors) had a direct effect on donations.

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Charity Begins at Home: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on Charitable Giving

Games ◽

10.3390/g9040095 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (4) ◽

pp. 95 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Catherine Eckel ◽

Benjamin Priday ◽

Rick Wilson

Keyword(s):

Field Experiment ◽

Charitable Giving ◽

Fire Department ◽

Dictator Game ◽

Charitable Organizations ◽

Fixed Amount ◽

Local Organizations ◽

The Gift ◽

The Individual ◽

Different Levels

Charities operate at different levels: national, state, or local. We test the effect of the level of the organization on charitable giving in a sample of adults in two Texas communities. Subjects make four charitable giving “dictator game” decisions from a fixed amount of money provided by the experimenter. Three decisions target different charitable organizations, all of which have a disaster-relief mission, but differ in the level of operation. The fourth targets an individual recipient, identified by the local fire department as a victim of a fire. One of the four is selected randomly for payment. Giving is significantly higher to national and local organizations compared to state. We find a higher propensity to donate and larger amount donated to the individual relative to all organizations. Subsequent analysis compares a number of demographic and attitudinal covariates with donations to specific charities. In a second decision, subjects instead indicate which of their four prior decisions they would most prefer to implement. Here we see that a majority of subjects prefer the gift to the individual.

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