Experimental studies have modeled individual funding of social projects as contributions to a threshold public good. We examine donors’ behavior when they face multiple threshold public goods and the possibility of coordinating their contributions via an intermediary. Employing the experimental design developed in Corazzini, Cotton, and Reggiani (2020), we vary both the size of a ‘destination rule’, which places restrictions on the intermediary’s use of a donor’s funds, as well as the overhead cost of the intermediary, modeled as a sunk cost incurred by the intermediary whether or not any of the public goods are successfully funded. We show that subjects behave in line with equilibrium predictions with regard to the size of the destination rule, only increasing their contributions in the presence of a relatively high destination rule that prevents expropriation by the intermediary. However, we find that the positive effect of a high destination rule is undone in the presence of overhead sunk costs on the intermediary, thus providing evidence in favor of the sunk-cost bias and ‘overhead aversion’ that are commonly exhibited by donors exhibit when selecting charities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.