Charity begins at home: a lab-in-the-field experiment on charitable giving
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Charity begins at home: a lab-in-the-field experiment on charitable giving
zbMATH Open document ID: 1419.91184
author: Catherine Eckel
author: Benjamin A. Priday
author: Rick K. Wilson
published in: Games
publication date: 2019-01-21T00:00:00Z
review text: Summary: 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.
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91A90
zbMATH DE Number: 7003988
zbMATH Keywords: charitable giving
zbMATH Keywords: comparative dictator game
zbMATH Keywords: lab-in-the-field experiment
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: g9040095
OpenAlex ID: W2900897111
cites work: Altruism in anonymous dictator games
cites work: Social distance matters in dictator games: evidence from 11 Mexican villages
cites work: Helping a victim or helping the victim: Altruism and identifiability
cites work: Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving
cites work: Trust, reciprocity, and social history
cites work: Which is the fair sex? Gender differences in altruism.
DOI: 10.3390/G9040095
description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 7003988