Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic models, this paper shows that an additional mechanism is relevant: the use of risk as an excuse not to give. In a laboratory study, participants evaluate risky payoffs for themselves and risky payoffs for a charity. When their decisions do not involve tradeoffs between money for themselves and the charity, they respond very similarly to self risk and charity risk. By contrast, when their decisions force tradeoffs between money for themselves and the charity, participants act more averse to charity risk and less averse to self risk. These altered responses to risk bias participants towards choosing payoffs for themselves more often, consistent with excuse-driven responses to risk. Additional results support the existence of excuse-driven types.

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We run a series of experiments, involving over 4,000 online participants and over 10,000 school-aged youth. When individuals are asked to subjectively describe their performance on a male-typed task relating to math and science, we find a large gender gap in self-evaluations. This gap arises both when self-evaluations are provided to potential employers, and thus measure self-promotion, and when self-evaluations are not driven by incentives to promote. The gender gap in self-evaluations proves persistent and arises as early as the sixth grade. No gender gap arises, however, if individuals are instead asked about their performance on a more female-typed task.

In job applications, job interviews, performance reviews, and a wide range of other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance.In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally performing men. This gender gap in self-promotion is notably persistent. It stays just as strong when we eliminate gender differences in confidence about performance and when we eliminate strategic incentives to engage in self-promotion. Because of the prevalence of self-promotion opportunities, this self-promotion gap may contribute to the persistent gender gap in education and labor market outcomes.

There is an increasing pressure to give more wisely and effectively. There is, relatedly, an increasing focus on charity performance metrics. Through a series of experiments, this paper provides a caution to such a focus. Although information on charity performance metrics may facilitate more effective giving, it may also facilitate the development of excuses not to give. Managers of nonprofit organizations should carefully assess this tension when determining whether and how to provide information on their performance metrics. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics.