In a door-to-door fundraising field experiment, we study the impact of fundraising mechanisms on charitable giving. We … and the lottery. Although the all-pay auction is the superior fundraising mechanism both in theory and in the laboratory …, it raised the lowest revenue per household in the field. Our experiment reveals two potential explanations for this …

There has been little systematic study of the mechanisms typically used to raise money for charity. One of the most … experiment randomly assigning participants to four raffle treatments to examine the effectiveness of alternative incentive … revenue gains are available on both margins. Our experiment, and others like it, illustrates the power of field experiments to …