Unit Asking — a method for increasing donations: A replication and extension

Abstract

We replicate and extend unit asking – a method to increase donations by first asking donors for their willingness to donate for one unit and then asking for donations for multiple units (Hsee, Zhang & Xu, 2013) We conducted a large scale replication and extension using a 2 (unit asking, control) × 3 (domains; children (original), animals, environment) between-subjects design. Across three domains, we find that unit asking increased donations, suggesting that this method can be used to increase giving to different charitable causes.

Investigating (sequential) unit asking: An unsuccessful quest for scope sensitivity in willingness to donate judgments

“…Open response WTD judgments often result in large outliers due to the lack of an upper bound. Previous papers on Unit Asking address this by winsorizing outliers and then employing a ‐test or analysis of variance (ANOVA) (Hsee et al, 2013; Karlsson et al, 2020). Winsorizing replaces values above the 95th percentile of values provided with the value exactly at the 95th percentile, to reduce the skew in the data.…”

“…Whereas the increase in average donations through CUA has been well-established (Hsee et al, 2013;Karlsson et al, 2020;Marcinkiewicz, 2016;Simmons, 2013), it is not yet clear to what degree this demonstrates scope sensitivity on the part of participants, even the weak ordinal form. For scope sensitivity, participants should give more as the number of affected people increases, even if the number of repeated questions remains the same (e.g., after being asked about one individual, they should donate more to help 10,000 affected individuals than to help 100).…”

“…Open response WTD judgments often result in large outliers due to the lack of an upper bound. Previous papers on Unit Asking address this by winsorizing outliers and then employing a t-test or analysis of variance (ANOVA) (Hsee et al, 2013;Karlsson et al, 2020).…”

“…When people are first asked about one individual and in the next step asked about a larger number, their desire for consistency drives them to donate an amount that is proportional to the amount that they donated for one individual. Unit Asking has repeatedly been shown to be highly effective in increasing donations over Direct Asking (DA) (where participants are solely asked about the total number of people and not initially asked about one individual Karlsson et al, 2020; Marcinkiewicz, 2016; Simmons, 2013). For example, participants donated more than twice as much to help 20 children when they were first asked to think about how much they would donate to help one child, than when they were only asked to think about all 20 children (M = $49.42 vs. M = $18.03, Hsee et al, 2013).…”

“…Such a study would enable stronger conclusions as to the effectiveness of SUA "in increasing charitable donations in the wild." Further, in line with previous studies on Unit Asking(Hsee et al, 2013;Karlsson et al, 2020), we only include a picture of one needy child and do not increase the number of children in the picture as scope increases. The fact that the Unit Asking method increases aver-This paper showed the difficulty in inducing scope sensitivity in WTD judgments.…”