Charity in the Laboratory: Matching, Competition, and Group Identity

We conduct a laboratory experiment in which participants can make donations to real charities. We vary whether the experimenter provides matching funds for any such donations, and whether there is individual or team competition for these matching funds. Our results indicate that providing matching f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Management science Vol. 65; no. 3; pp. 1398 - 1407
Main Authors: Charness, Gary, Holder, Patrick
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Linthicum INFORMS 01.03.2019
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Subjects:
Analysis
Charitable contributions
Charities
Competition
Donations
Endowment
Experiments
Funds
Group identity
Laboratories
laboratory experiment
Matching
matching funds
Motivation
Motivation (Psychology)
Philanthropy
Prosocial behavior
Social interest
team competition
Teams
ISSN:0025-1909, 1526-5501
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We conduct a laboratory experiment in which participants can make donations to real charities. We vary whether the experimenter provides matching funds for any such donations, and whether there is individual or team competition for these matching funds. Our results indicate that providing matching funds for all donations does increase donations from 23% to 33% of the endowment. While individual competition for matching funds had nearly the same effectiveness as matching all donations, by far the most effective approach was to form (anonymous) teams that competed for matching funds; this led to donations of 47% of the endowment. We appeal to the notion of group identity to explain our results—participants seemed to be reluctant to “let down their team” in a competition. Our results can be seen as providing support for the notion that combining group identity and competition creates a motivation that can potentially be harnessed effectively for prosocial purposes. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
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ISSN:0025-1909
1526-5501
DOI:10.1287/mnsc.2017.2923