Do Beliefs About Peers Matter for Donation Matching? Experiments in the Field and Laboratory

Abstract

Charitable giving has been about 2% of US GDP since the turn of the century. A popular fundraising tool is donation matching where every dollar is matched by a third party. But field experiments find that matching does not always increase donations. This may occur because individuals believe that peer donors will exhaust the matching funds. We develop a theory of how beliefs about peers' donations affect one's own likelihood of donation. We test our theory using novel "threshold match" treatments in field and laboratory experiments. These treatments form small groups and offer a flat matching bonus if a threshold number of donations is received. One "threshold match" treatment more than doubles the donation rate in the field relative to no match. To better understand the mechanism behind this huge increase, we use a lab study to replicate the field results and further show that beliefs about peers' donations matter. Our theoretical, lab, and field results combined suggest people are more likely to donate when they believe they are more pivotal to securing matching money. Beliefs about others matter, and they should be taken into account when trying to increase donations.

Social Trust in Polarized Times: How Perceptions of Political Polarization Affect Americans’ Trust in Each Other

“…What matters is one’s belief about the actions of others, which is the essence of social trust. Especially given an offer to match donations conditional on meeting a certain threshold of joint participation, such as the one used here, people take into account the likely behavior of others when deciding whether to donate or not (see Gee & Schreck, 2018 ). My results demonstrate that perceptions of polarization play a consequential role in conditioning individual behavior for collective action and in society’s ability to produce charitable public goods.…”

Beliefs, Learning, and Personality in the Indefinitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma

“…39 Furthermore, in our setting with ten strategies, the bias toward flattening the reported distribution is unlikely to be important: Harrison et al (2017) find that for empirically plausible levels of risk aversion, the bias is small unless the set of events over which beliefs are elicited is binary or close to binary. 40 36 Other papers that use the QSR to elicit beliefs about a distribution over three or more choices include Terracol and Vaksmann (2009), Danz et al (2012), Hyndman et al (2012) and Gee and Schreck (2018).…”

Strategic thinking and behavior during a pandemic

“…That is, the public good (an additional donation of $100) would be supplied only to the extent that a particular threshold is met. In this case, the contingency (which is conceptually similar to matching mechanisms used by many institutions; e.g., Gee & Schreck, 2018;Meier, 2007) was that a majority of the participants contributed their resources to this end. reliabilities for the four strategic thinking sub-scales in the context of the donation decision were as follows: egocentric orientation: =.87, dependency orientation: =.89, impact orientation: =.82, and altercentric orientation: =.89.…”