On the Desiderata for Online Altruism

Abstract

Online donation platforms help equalize access to opportunity and funding in cases where inequalities exist. In the context of public school education in the United States, for instance, financial inequalities have been shown to be reflected in the educational system, since schools are primarily funded through local property taxes. In response, private charitable donation platforms such as DonorsChoose.org have emerged seeking to alleviate systemic inequalities. Yet, the question remains of how effective these platforms are in redressing existing funding inequalities across school districts. Our analysis of donation data from DonorsChoose shows that such platforms may in fact be ineffective in mitigating existing inequalities or may even exacerbate them. In this paper, we explore how online educational charities could direct more funding towards more impoverished schools without compromising their donors' freedom of choice with respect to donation targets. Seeking to answer this question, we draw on the line of work on choice architectures in behavioral economics and pose a novel research question on the impact of interface design on equity in socio-technical systems. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate how simple interface design interventions - such as modifying default rankings or displaying additional information about schools - might lead to changes in donation distributions helping platforms direct more funding towards schools in need. Going beyond online educational charities, we hope that our work will bring attention to the role of interface design nudges in the social requirements of online altruism.

School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement

“…To avoid confounding from state-level shocks, we focus on triple-difference specifications that use the achievement gap between low-and high-income districts as the dependent variable. Notes: Each entry in columns 2-5 represents the coefficient from a separate event study regression, using the one-parameter specification in equation (1). Dependent variables are constructed from district-level finance summaries indicated by row headings and expressed in per pupil terms; means across districts are reported in column 1.…”

Designing Resource Allocation Tools to Promote Fair Allocation: Do Visualization and Information Framing Matter?

“…First, we did not push interactive design beyond implementing a slider to dynamically control the allocation. The HCI literature can provide inspiration to extend our approach to foster particular behaviors, such as by inserting visual nudges [51], adding stickiness [68], or repeatedly nudging the donor [19,55]. Further, creative, engaging interaction paradigms could activate curiosity and playfulness in tools dealing with otherwise serious problems.…”

“…Donation websites such as donorschoose.org or fundraising platforms like gofundme.com act as tools which let users search for similar causes to which allocate their resources, but comparison across these causes is not supported. Prior research has focused on encouraging people to contribute more towards a charity using tools such as conversational agents [65], web interfaces [47,55], and visual media like photographs and visualizations to elicit affective emotions such as compassion [28,40]. These aim to elicit more donations, but little is known about tools to help people allocate available charitable resources more equally.…”

“…showing resources allocated to individuals instead of showing resources allocated to groups. Our research is grounded in past work looking at the effects of information framing on decision making tasks [41], and nudging in computational interfaces [19,55]. These works suggest that the way information is presented can influence people's choices, but did not explore effects on fair allocations.…”

On Quantifying Knowledge Segregation in Society

“…Due to the enormity and scale at which Amazon operates, Amazon can facilitate these interactions only by relying on mass-scale automation and on countless deliberate design choices that determine how sellers can present their products to customers, and how customers express their preferences in the face of these results. These design choices result in choice architectures (Johnson et al, 2012;Mota et al, 2020). Originating from debates about behavioral policy-making, the term choice architecture refers to a deliberate organizing of context in which people make decisions (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008, 3).…”