scholarly journals Announcements of Support and Public Good Provision

2017 ◽  
Vol 107 (12) ◽  
pp. 3760-3787 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judd B. Kessler

Providing information about contributions to public goods is known to generate further contributions. However, it is often impossible to provide verifiable information on contributions. Through a large-scale field experiment and a series of laboratory experiments, I show that nonbinding announcements of support for a public good encourage others to contribute, even when actual contributions might not or cannot be made. Providing a way to easily announce support for a charity increases donations by $865 per workplace fundraising campaign (or 16 percent of average giving). I discuss implications for understanding prosocial behavior and for organizations aiming to increase contributions to public goods. (JEL C93, D64, D83, H41, L31)

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (19) ◽  
pp. 5218-5220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Rogers ◽  
John Ternovski ◽  
Erez Yoeli

People contribute more to public goods when their contributions are made more observable to others. We report an intervention that subtly increases the observability of public goods contributions when people are solicited privately and impersonally (e.g., mail, email, social media). This intervention is tested in a large-scale field experiment (n = 770,946) in which people are encouraged to vote through get-out-the-vote letters. We vary whether the letters include the message, “We may call you after the election to ask about your voting experience.” Increasing the perceived observability of whether people vote by including that message increased the impact of the get-out-the-vote letters by more than the entire effect of a typical get-out-the-vote letter. This technique for increasing perceived observability can be replicated whenever public goods solicitations are made in private.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Levashina ◽  
Frederick P. Morgeson ◽  
Michael A. Campion

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hide-Fumi Yokoo

AbstractI develop a model of inequality aversion and public goods that allows the marginal rate of substitution to be variable. As a theoretical foundation, utility function of the standard public goods model is nested in the Fehr-Schmidt model. An individual’s contribution function for a public good is derived by solving the problem of kinky preference and examining both interior and corner solutions. Results show that the derived contribution function is not monotonic with respect to the other individual’s provision. Thus, the model can be used to explain empirical evidence for the effect of social comparison on public-good provision.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingvild Almås ◽  
Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge ◽  
Kjetil Bjorvatn ◽  
Vincent Somville ◽  
Bertil Tungodden

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (52) ◽  
pp. 14944-14948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Ai ◽  
Roy Chen ◽  
Yan Chen ◽  
Qiaozhu Mei ◽  
Webb Phillips

This paper reports the results of a large-scale field experiment designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and prosocial lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get members to join teams as well as the subsequent impact on lending. We find that emails do increase the likelihood that a lender joins a team, and that joining a team increases lending in a short window (1 wk) following our intervention. The impact on lending is large relative to median lender lifetime loans. We also find that lenders are more likely to join teams recommended based on location similarity rather than team status. Our results suggest team recommendation can be an effective behavioral mechanism to increase prosocial lending.


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