The Economics of Philanthropy

Donations and Fundraising

Kimberley Scharf, Mirco Tonin, Clemens Fuest

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262348058
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Economists are increasingly aware of the need to better understand philanthropic activities. In this book, economists address a variety of topics related to the economics of philanthropy, ranging from the determinants of giving to the effectiveness of fundraising techniques. The contributions focus on individual motives for giving and volunteering, and in particular how they affect donation outcomes, fundraising decisions, and public policies toward giving.

Previous research has viewed motives for giving as embedded in formal models of economic behavior with rational agents who maximize their own utility while constrained by a budget. These models, however, have been shown to have poor predictive power, neglecting direct and indirect motives for giving. The contributors consider, among other subjects, the free-riding problem in these models; altruistic, direct, and indirect motives for giving, addressed both theoretically and with lab experiments; the linear public good game; the role of social information; the effectiveness of matching gifts and premiums; motives for unpaid volunteering; subscription models as a way to regulate revenue streams; and increasing reliance on public funds.

Contributors
James Andreoni, Jon Behar, Avner Ben-Ner, Ted Bergstrom, Greg Bose, Sarah Brown, Catherine C. Eckel, Christina Gravert, David H. Herberich, Samantha Horn, Fantingyu Hu, Dean Karlan, Ann-Kathrin Koessler, Benjamin M. Marx, Jonathan Meer, Michael Menietti, Bradley Minaker, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, A. Abigail Payne, Maria P. Recalde, Kimberley Scharf, Claudia Schwirplies, Marta Serra-Garcia, Sarah Smith, Karl Taylor, Mette Trier Damgaard, Lise Vesterlund, Laura Villalobos

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Efficient Ethical Rules for Volunteer’s Dilemmas
• 2. The Bright and Dark Sides of Altruism
• 3. Who Gives? The Roles of Empathy and Impulsiveness
• 4. Charitable Giving in the Laboratory: Advantages of the Piecewise Linear Public Goods Game
• 5. Increasing the Social Impact of Giving: An Experiment at Six Universities
• 6. The Charitable Response to a Nondirected Matching Gift
• 7. Intuitive Donating: Testing One-Line Solicitations for $1 Donations in a Large Online Experiment
• 8. It’s Not the Thought That Counts: A Field Experiment on Gift Exchange and Giving at a Public University
• 9. Charitable Donations of Time and Money: Complements or Substitutes? Evidence from UK Data
• 10. The Impact of Government Funded Initiatives on Charity Revenues
• 11. Forgetful or Reluctant? Evidence on Reminder Response and Donor Behavior from Panel Data
• 12. The Donation Response to Natural Disasters
• List of Contributors
• Index