Title: Replication Data for: "Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving"

Type Dataset DellaVigna, Stefano, List, John, Malmendier, Ulrike (2018): Replication Data for: "Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving". Harvard Dataverse. Dataset. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/QNVCAY

Authors: DellaVigna, Stefano (University of California, Berkeley) ; List, John (University of Chicago) ; Malmendier, Ulrike (University of California, Berkeley) ; DellaVigna, Stefano (University of California, Berkeley) ; List, John (University of Chicago) ; Malmendier, Ulrike (University of California, Berkeley) ;

Links

• Item record in Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab Dataverse
• Digital object URL

Summary

Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door- to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.80 for an in-state charity and $1.40 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower the utility of the potential donors. JELCodes:C93,D03,H41.

More information

• DOI: 10.7910/DVN/QNVCAY

Subjects

• Social Sciences

Dates

• Publication date: 2018
• Submitted: May 25, 2018
• Updated: July 25, 2018

Rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ CC0 Waiver

Format

electronic resource

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