IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/apeclt/v19y2012i8p745-748.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Choosing to give more: experimental evidence on restricted gifts and charitable behaviour

Author

Listed:
  • Sara E. Helms
  • Brian L. Scott
  • Jeremy P. Thornton

Abstract

It is common for charitable organizations to allow donors to place material restrictions on their gifts. Nonprofit firms and fundraisers generally believe that allowing gift restrictions will increase donation revenue. Restricted gifts are costly to the nonprofit firms because of increased management expenses and an inability to reallocate gifts to higher valued uses. We report the results of an experiment which tests the influence of charitable gift restrictions on donor behaviour. We find that allowing restricted gifts significantly increases the amount given in a laboratory setting. However, we find no evidence that grant restrictions increase the probability of giving.

Suggested Citation

  • Sara E. Helms & Brian L. Scott & Jeremy P. Thornton, 2012. "Choosing to give more: experimental evidence on restricted gifts and charitable behaviour," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(8), pages 745-748, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:19:y:2012:i:8:p:745-748
    DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2011.599784
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2011.599784
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13504851.2011.599784?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dean Karlan & John A. List, 2007. "Does Price Matter in Charitable Giving? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(5), pages 1774-1793, December.
    2. Julio Videras, 2005. "Luck and giving," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(15), pages 953-956.
    3. John A. List, 2011. "The Market for Charitable Giving," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 25(2), pages 157-180, Spring.
    4. Philip Grossman & Matthew Parrett, 2011. "Religion and prosocial behaviour: a field test," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(6), pages 523-526.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kristy Jones, 2017. "Paternalism and Ethnicity in Giving," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 93(302), pages 420-433, September.
    2. Lata Gangadharan & Philip J. Grossman & Kristy Jones, 2014. "Deconstructing Giving: Donor Types and How They Give," Monash Economics Working Papers 53-14, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    3. Gangadharan, Lata & Grossman, Philip J. & Jones, Kristy & Leister, C. Matthew, 2018. "Paternalistic giving: Restricting recipient choice," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 143-170.
    4. Sweeney, Rohan & Mortimer, Duncan & Johnston, David W., 2014. "Do Sector Wide Approaches for health aid delivery lead to ‘donor-flight’? A comparison of 46 low-income countries," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 38-46.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Omar Al-Ubaydli & John List & Claire Mackevicius & Min Sok Lee & Dana Suskind, 2019. "How Can Experiments Play a Greater Role in Public Policy? 12 Proposals from an Economic Model of Scaling," Artefactual Field Experiments 00679, The Field Experiments Website.
    2. Karlan, Dean & List, John A., 2020. "How can Bill and Melinda Gates increase other people's donations to fund public goods?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    3. Levin, Tova & Levitt, Steven D. & List, John A., 2023. "A Glimpse into the world of high capacity givers: Experimental evidence from a university capital campaign," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 212(C), pages 644-658.
    4. Asatryan, Zareh & Joulfaian, David, 2022. "Taxes and Business Philanthropy in Armenia," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 200(C), pages 914-930.
    5. Ernan Haruvy & Peter Popkowski Leszczyc & Greg Allenby & Russell Belk & Catherine Eckel & Robert Fisher & Sherry Xin Li & John A. List & Yu Ma & Yu Wang, 2020. "Fundraising design: key issues, unifying framework, and open puzzles," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 31(4), pages 371-380, December.
    6. Roman M. Sheremeta & Neslihan Uler, 2021. "The impact of taxes and wasteful government spending on giving," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(2), pages 355-386, June.
    7. Kimberley Scharf & Sarah Smith & Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, 2022. "Lift and Shift: The Effect of Fundraising Interventions in Charity Space and Time," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 296-321, August.
    8. Daniel M. Hungerman & Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, 2021. "Impure Impact Giving: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 129(5), pages 1553-1614.
    9. Qian Weng & Haoran He, 2018. "Geographic Distance, Income And Charitable Giving: Evidence From China," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 64(05), pages 1145-1169, May.
    10. Edwards, James T. & List, John A., 2014. "Toward an understanding of why suggestions work in charitable fundraising: Theory and evidence from a natural field experiment," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 1-13.
    11. Epperson, Raphael & Reif, Christiane, 2018. "Matching schemes and public goods: A review," ZEW Discussion Papers 17-070, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, revised 2018.
    12. Eckel, Catherine & Guney, Begum & Uler, Neslihan, 2020. "Independent vs. Coordinated Fundraising: Understanding the Role of Information," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    13. Feine, Gregor & Groh, Elke D. & von Loessl, Victor & Wetzel, Heike, 2021. "The double dividend of social information in charitable giving: Evidence from a framed field experiment," VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics 242437, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    14. Zachary Halberstam & James R. Hines Jr., 2023. "Quality-Aware Tax Incentives for Charitable Contributions," CESifo Working Paper Series 10250, CESifo.
    15. Nadine Chlaß & Lata Gangadharan & Kristy Jones, 2015. "Charitable giving and intermediation," Jena Economics Research Papers 2015-021, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    16. Dean Karlan and John A. List, 2012. "How Can Bill and Melinda Gates Increase Other People’s Donations to Fund Public Goods? - Working Paper 292," Working Papers 292, Center for Global Development.
    17. John A. List & James J. Murphy & Michael K. Price & Alexander G. James, 2019. "Do Appeals to Donor Benefits Raise More Money than Appeals to Recipient Benefits? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment with Pick.Click.Give," NBER Working Papers 26559, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Antinyan, Armenak & Baghdasaryan, Vardan & Grigoryan, Aleksandr, 2022. "Charitable giving, social capital, and positional concerns," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    19. Krieg, Justin & Samek, Anya, 2017. "When charities compete: A laboratory experiment with simultaneous public goods," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 40-57.
    20. Tetsuya KAWAMURA & Takanori Ida & Kazuhito Ogawa, 2018. "Simultaneous Effect of Monetary and Non-Monetary Interventions on Crowd-Funding Field Experimental Evidence:R&D in New Sources of Energy," Discussion papers e-18-005, Graduate School of Economics , Kyoto University.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:19:y:2012:i:8:p:745-748. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEL20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.