Charity Begins at Home: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on Charitable Giving Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Charities operate at different levels: national, state, or local. We test the effect of the level of the organization on charitable giving in a sample of adults in two Texas communities. Subjects make four charitable giving dictator game decisions from a fixed amount of money provided by the experimenter. Three decisions target different charitable organizations, all of which have a disaster-relief mission, but differ in the level of operation. The fourth targets an individual recipient, identified by the local fire department as a victim of a fire. One of the four is selected randomly for payment. Giving is significantly higher to national and local organizations compared to state. We find a higher propensity to donate and larger amount donated to the individual relative to all organizations. Subsequent analysis compares a number of demographic and attitudinal covariates with donations to specific charities. In a second decision, subjects instead indicate which of their four prior decisions they would most prefer to implement. Here we see that a majority of subjects prefer the gift to the individual.

published proceedings

  • Games

altmetric score

  • 1.75

author list (cited authors)

  • Eckel, C. C., Priday, B. A., & Wilson, R. K.

citation count

  • 8

complete list of authors

  • Eckel, Catherine C||Priday, Benjamin A||Wilson, Rick K

publication date

  • January 2018

publisher

published in