Charitable Giving as a Gift Exchange - Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Armin Falk. Social Science Research Network, 2003

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study reports data from a field experiment that was nconducted to investigate the relevance of gift-exchange for charitable ngiving. Roughly 10,000 solicitation letters were sent to potential donors nin the experiment. One third of the letters contained no gift, one third ncontained a small gift and one third contained a large gift. Whether a npotential donor received a letter with or without a gift was randomly ndetermined. We observe strong and systematic effects from including gifts. nCompared to the no gift condition, the relative frequency of donations nincreased by 17 percent if a small gift was included and by 75 percent for na large gift. Consequently, including gifts was highly profitable for the ncharitable organization. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, nit shows that reciprocity is an important motive for charitable giving, in naddition to the warm-glow motive. Second, the paper confirms the economic nrelevance of reciprocity by using field data. This extends the current body nof research on reciprocity, which is almost exclusively confined to nlaboratory studies.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cd8bcae6113db9866b4a05c12ad7fa75b2b8ec4

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Citations in the corpus

Heterogeneous Social Preferences and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods (2006, background): “…shape the tendency to follow a leader's example in team work (Gächter and Renner 2004; Güth, Levati, Sutter, and van der Heijden 2004; Potters, Sefton and Vesterlund 2004), and others' actions might also govern contributions to charity (e.g., Falk 2004; Frey and Meier 2004; Shang and Croson 2005).”
Environmental Policy Theory Given Bounded Rationality and Other-regarding Preferences (2011, background): “Falk (2004) extends findings on reciprocity by using field data to assess motives behind charitable giving.”
A Survey of Economic Theories and Field Evidence on Pro-Social Behavior (2006, unknown): “ To test the effects of reciprocal norms in charitable giving, Falk (2004) conducted a large‐scale field experiment in which potential donors were provided with one of the following: no gift, a small gift, or a large gift in the solicitation letter.”
Human Motivation and Social Cooperation: Experimental and Analytical Foundations (2007, background): “Many experiments investigating strong reciprocity were first based on a student subject pool, but the results have since been extended to adult samples in advanced industrial societies (Falk 2004), and in a variety of cross cultural contexts (Henrich et al.”