Toward an Understanding of the Economics of Charity: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Craig Landry, Andreas Lange, John List, Michael Price and Nicholas Rupp ()

No 11611, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study develops theory and uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to explore the economics of charity. We approached nearly 5000 households, randomly divided into four experimental treatments, to shed light on key issues on the demand side of charitable fundraising. Empirical results are in line with our theory: in gross terms, our lottery treatments raised considerably more money than our voluntary contributions treatments. Interestingly, we find that a one standard deviation increase in female solicitor physical attractiveness is similar to that of the lottery incentive¡ªthe magnitude of the estimated difference in gifts is roughly equivalent to the treatment effect of moving from our theoretically most attractive approach (lotteries) to our least attractive approach (voluntary contributions).

JEL-codes: C93 H41 L30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-pbe
Note: PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Published as Landry, Craig E., Andreas Lange, John A. List, Michael K. Price and Nicholas G. Rupp. "Toward An Understanding Of The Economics Of Charity: Evidence From A Field Experiment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2006, v121(2,May), 747-782.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11611.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Toward an Understanding of the Economics of Charity: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2006)
Working Paper: Toward an understanding of the economics of charity: Evidence from a field experiment (2006)
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:nbr:nberwo:11611

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11611

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().