Charity begins at home: A lab-in-the-field experiment on charitable giving

Artikel

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: Games ; ISSN: 2073-4336 ; Volume: 9 ; Year: 2018 ; Issue: 4 ; Pages: 1-22 ; Basel: MDPI

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: charitable giving ; comparative dictator game ; lab-in-the-field experiment

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Eckel, Catherine C. ; Priday, Benjamin A. ; Wilson, Rick K.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): MDPI
• (where): Basel
• (when): 2018

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.3390/g9040095
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/219216
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET