IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/upf/upfgen/1246.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The size and distribution of donations: Effects of numbers of potential recipients

Author

Abstract

Whereas much literature exists on “choice overload,” little is known about effects of numbers of alternatives in donation decisions. How do these affect both the size and distribution of donations? We hypothesize that donations are affected by the reputation of recipients and increase with their number, albeit at a decreasing rate. Allocations to recipients reflect different concepts of fairness – “equity” and “equality.” Both may be employed but, since they differ in cognitive and emotional costs, numbers of recipients are important. Using a cognitive (emotional) argument, distributions become more uniform (skewed) as numbers increase. In a survey, respondents indicated how they would donate lottery winnings of 50 Euros. Results indicated that more was donated to NGO’s that respondents knew better. Second, total donations increased with the number of recipients albeit at a decreasing rate. Third, distributions of donations became more skewed as numbers increased. We comment on theoretical and practical implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Robin Hogarth & Emre Soyer, 2010. "The size and distribution of donations: Effects of numbers of potential recipients," Economics Working Papers 1246, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    • Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:1246
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1246.pdf
    File Function: Whole Paper
    Download Restriction: no

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Stephan Dickert & Janet Kleber & Ellen Peters & Paul Slovic, 2011. "Numeracy as a precursor to pro-social behavior: The impact of numeracy and presentation format on the cognitive mechanisms underlying donation decisions," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 6(7), pages 638-650, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    choice overload; donation decisions; fairness; equality; equity. leex;

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
    • L31 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Nonprofit Institutions; NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:upf:upfgen:1246. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (). General contact details of provider: http://www.econ.upf.edu/ .

    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.

    We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.