Bidding to Give in the Field: Door-to-Door Fundraisers Had it Right from the Start

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. ABSTRACT: In a door-to-door fundraising field experiment, we study the impact of fundraising mechanisms on charitable giving. We approached about 4500 households, each participating in either an all-pay auction, a lottery, a non-anonymous voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM), or an anonymous VCM. In contrast to the VCMs, households competed for a prize in the all-pay auction and the lottery. Although the all-pay auction is the superior fundraising mechanism both in theory and in the laboratory, it raised the lowest revenue per household in the field. Our experiment reveals that this can be attributed to substantially lower participation in the all-pay auction than in the other mechanisms while the average donation for those who contribute is only slightly higher. We explore various explanations for this lower participation and favor one that argues that competition in the all-pay mechanism crowds out intrinsic motivations to contribute. Among the non-anonymous mechanisms, the lottery raises the largest revenue per household. Notably, the method that scored best, the anonymous VCM, is the one most used by door-to-door fundraisers in the Netherlands. Terms of use: Documents in

Social Welfare and Behavioral Public Policies

“…Therefore, according to theoretical predictions and empirical evidences coming from field and laboratory experiments, it is possible to increase the private provision of public goods by means of self-financing lotteries. Hence, if the 46 An exception are results reported by Onderstal et al (2011). In a field experiment comparing different charity fundraising mechanisms, the authors find that voluntary contribution mechanism raises the most money followed by fixed-price private value lottery and fixed-price private value all-pay auction mechanism.…”

“…He sets the conditions under which lotteries outperform voluntary contribution mechanism, finding that the degree of efficiency obtained is an increasing function of the prize size. After Morgan's contribution, several papers have sought to confirm and further investigate his findings through laboratory (Carpenter et al, 2010;Corazzini et al, 2010;Faravelli and Stanca, 2012;Lange et al, 2007;Morgan and Sefton, 2000;Orzen, 2008;Schram and Onderstal, 2009) or field experiments (Landry et al, 2006;Onderstal et al, 2011). A common finding in this literature is that fixed-prize lotteries or auction mechanisms outperform voluntary contribution mechanism in the private provision of public goods 46 .…”