We examine how economic incentives affect pro-social behavior through the analysis of a unique dataset with information on more than 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives. Our findings are consistent with blood donors responding to incentives in a standard way; offering donors economic...

Experimental studies document that financial rewards discourage the performance of altruistic activities, because they destroy intrinsic altruistic motivations. We set up a randomized-controlled experiment, through a survey administered to 467 blood donors in an Italian town, and find that...

Early studies often found that offering economic incentives for undertaking prosocial and intrinsically motivated activities can crowd out motivation to perform these activities. More recent work highlights nuanced and important features related to whether crowding out (or substitution) is...

Experimental studies document that financial rewards discourage the performance of altruistic activities, because they destroy intrinsic altruistic motivations. We set up a randomized-controlled experiment, through a survey administered to 467 blood donors in an Italian town, and find that...

We examine how economic incentives affect pro-social behavior through the analysis of a unique dataset with information on more than 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives. Our findings are consistent with blood donors responding to incentives in a "standard" way; offering donors economic...

In public good games, voluntary contributions tend to start off high and decline as the game is repeated. If high contributors are matched, however, contributions tend to stay high. We propose a formalization predicting that high contributors will self-select into groups committed to charitable...

Individuals with a preference for keeping moral obligations may dislike learning that voluntary contributions are socially valuable: Such information can trigger unpleasant feelings of cognitive dissonance. I show that if initial beliefs about the social value of contributions are sufficiently...

Using longitudinal data on the entire population of blood donors in an Italian town, we examine how donors respond to a nonlinear award scheme that rewards them with symbolic prizes (medals) when they reach certain donation quotas. Our results indicate that donors significantly increase the...

In public good games, voluntary contributions tend to start off high and decline as the game is repeated. If high contributors are matched, however, contributions tend to stay high. We propose a formalization predicting that high contributors will self-select into groups committed to charitable...

Experimental studies document that financial rewards discourage the performance of altruistic activities, because they destroy intrinsic altruistic motivations. We set up a randomized-controlled experiment, through a survey administered to 467 blood donors in an Italian town, and find that...