The extant experimental design to investigate warm glow and altruism elicits a single measure of crowdout. Not recognizing that impure altruism predicts crowd-out is a function of giving-by-others, this design's power to reject pure altruism varies with the level of giving-by-others, and it cannot identify the strength of warm glow and altruism preferences. These limitations are addressed with a new design that elicits crowd-out at a low and at a high level of giving-by-others. Consistent with impure altruism we find decreasing crowd-out as giving-by-others increases. However warm glow is weak in our experiment and altruism largely explains why people give.
Theories of moral development posit that an internalized moral value that one should help those in need—the principle of care—evokes helping behaviour in situations where empathic concern does not. Examples of such situations are helping behaviours that involve cognitive deliberation and planning, that benefit others who are known only in the abstract, and who are out‐group members. Charitable giving to help people in need is an important helping behaviour that has these characteristics. Therefore we hypothesized that the principle of care would be positively associated with charitable giving to help people in need, and that the principle of care would mediate the empathic concern–giving relationship. The two hypotheses were tested across four studies. The studies used four different samples, including three nationally representative samples from the American and Dutch populations, and included both self‐reports of giving (Studies 1–3), giving observed in a survey experiment (Study 3), and giving observed in a laboratory experiment (Study 4). The evidence from these studies indicated that a moral principle to care for others was associated with charitable giving to help people in need and mediated the empathic concern–giving relationship. © 2016 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology
Fundraising interventions may lift donations and/or shift their composition and timing, making it important to study their effect across charity space and time. We find that major fundraising appeals lift total donations, but surprisingly shift donations to other charities across time. To explain this, we develop a two-period model with two sources of warm glow that relates donation responses to underlying preference parameters. A dynamic framework, combined with rich data, provides opportunities to identify substitutability/complementarity in warm glow. The observed pattern is possible only if the two sources of warm glow are substitutes and warm glow is intertemporally substitutable.
This study investigated the relationship between the monetary giving and volunteering behavior of adolescents and the role‐modeling and conversations about giving provided by their parents. The participants are a large nationally‐representative sample of 12–18 year‐olds from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics' Child Development Supplement (n = 1244). Adolescents reported whether they gave money and whether they volunteered. In a separate interview parents reported whether they talked to their adolescent about giving. In a third interview, parents reported whether they gave money and volunteered. The results show that both role‐modeling and conversations about giving are strongly related to adolescents' giving and volunteering. Knowing that both role‐modeling and conversation are strongly related to adolescents' giving and volunteering suggests an often over‐looked way for practitioners and policy‐makers to nurture giving and volunteering among adults: start earlier, during adolescence, by guiding parents in their role‐modeling of, and conversations about, charitable giving and volunteering.
This study investigated whether family structure transition and low income are risk factors in the development of prosocial behavior. Models of young adults’ prosocial behavior – charitable giving and volunteering – were estimated as functions of their family structure and income during the stages of childhood. Participants were a representative sample of 1,011 American young adults. In the full sample, family structure transition during adolescence was negatively associated with subsequent charitable giving in young adulthood. Low income during adolescence was negatively associated with both giving and volunteering in young adulthood. European-American young men also exhibited a negative association between family structure transition during adolescence and subsequent volunteering. The results did not seem to describe African-American young adults. Keeping this qualification in mind, the results suggest that adolescence is a sensitive stage in the development of charitable giving and volunteering.
We are grateful to Una Osili for many discussions and for suggesting that we characterize the results as "donors down, dollars per donor holding steady", René Bekkers for helpful suggestions, and participants at the 45 th ARNOVA Conference session on "Generation gaps, social media use, and implications for fundraising" for their comments. More than the usual thanks go to Jimmy Han for helping us produce some of the results and helping with technical aspects of the project.
Optimal designs of both public policy and fundraising mechanisms rely on the extent to which charitable donations are motivated by altruism and "warm-glow." Motives for giving influence donor responses to changes in public funding for projects, and influence the effectiveness of a wide range of solicitation strategies, such as the characteristics of the ask, whether past donations should be announced to future donors, and whether a charitable lottery is likely to increase the funds raised.To identify preferences for charitable giving, researchers center on measuring how much individual donations respond to, or are crowded out by, donations by others. We explore this central crowd-out test and demonstrate that it is not well suited for identifying preferences.The theory of pure altruism assumes that the sole motive for charitable giving is the utility derived from the charity's output, e.g., from children in need getting aid * Ottoni-Wilhelm: Department of Economics, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, 425 University Boulevard, CA516, Indianapolis, IN 46202 (email: mowilhelm@iupui.edu); Vesterlund: Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, 4928 WW Posvar Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, and NBER (email: vester@ pitt.edu); Xie: Department of Economics, Concordia University, 1455 Maisonneuve Boulevard W, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada (email: huan.xie@concordia.ca). This paper was accepted to the AER under the guidance of Marianne Bertrand, Coeditor. We thank Kong Wah Lai, Michael Menietti, and Linnea Warren, who helped conduct the experiments. We thank Sandi Wraith and the American Red Cross of South Western Pennsylvania for their help in facilitating our research. We are grateful to Bo Honoré for extending his Stata code for the twosided fixed-effects censored estimator to models with variable censoring levels. We thank
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