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Our intent in this paper was to provide experimental evidence for the Gift Exchange Mechanism in the context of charitable donations in Pakistan. We chose a simple and elegant experiment of Falk as the basis for our experiment. Due to institutional differences, we replaced his postal campaign for charitable donations by a door-to-door campaign. The additional opportunity for social interaction, and cultural differences, led to substantial and unexpected variation in the results. Most importantly, in direct contrast to results of Falk, both frequency and average size of donations declined with increasing gift size. Thus the GEM failed to operate in this experiment. We provide some potential explanations for this surprising result. Our experiment also provides some information on gender and income effects on charitable donations, which vary from main findings in the literature. In particular, we find that females contribute more in frequency and size, and that the share of giving declines with income.

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Razzaque (2009) studied the role of gender in the ultimatum game by running experiments on students in various cities in Pakistan. He used standard confirmatory data analysis techniques, which work well in familiar contexts, where relevant hypotheses of interest are known in advance. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate that exploratory data analysis is much better suited to the study of experimental data where the goal is to discover patterns of interest. Our exploratory re-analysis of the original data set of Razzaque (2009) leads to several new insights. While we re-confirm the main finding of Razzaque regarding the greater generosity of males, additional analysis suggests that this is driven by student subculture in Pakistan, and would not generalise to the population at large. In addition, we find strong effect of urbanisation. Our exploratory data analysis also offers considerable additional insights into the learning process that takes place over the course of a sequence of games. JEL Classification: C78, C81, C91, J16 Keywords: Ultimatum Game, Gender Differences, Exploratory Data Analysis

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