There has been little systematic study of the mechanisms typically used to raise money for charity. One of the most common is the simple raffle in which participants purchase chances to win a prize at a constant price. We conduct a field experiment randomly assigning participants to four raffle...

In a door-to-door fundraising field experiment, we study the impact of fundraising mechanisms on charitable giving. We approached about 4500 households, each participating in either an all-pay auction, a lottery, a non-anonymous voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM), or an anonymous VCM. In...

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, so their donation is not...

Theory commonly posits agents who care both for the level of provision of a public good and the extent to which they personally contribute to the cause. Simply put, agents feel some "warm glow" from the donations they make. I discuss a fundraiser devised to exogenously vary the incentive to give...

This paper theoretically explores the voluntary provision of a public good in a finitely repeated setting. Agents' utility is the sum of their monetary earnings and a non-material psychological component that can be interpreted as a taste for efficiency and/or fairness. An arbitrarily small...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

We study how moral suasion that appeals to two major ethical theories, Consequentialism and Deontology, affects individual intentions to contribute to a public good. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as an exemplary case where there is a large gap between private and social costs and where moral...

We run a public good experiment in the field and in the lab with (partly) the same subjects. The field experiment is a true natural field experiment as subjects do not know that they are exposed to an experimental variation. We can show that subjects' behavior in the classic lab public good...

We run a public good experiment in the field and in the lab with (partly) the same subjects. The field experiment is a true natural field experiment as subjects do not know that they are exposed to an experimental variation. We can show that subjects' behavior in the classic lab public good...

To investigate the external validity of laboratory results, we combine a public good experiment with three treatments in a field experiment. One treatment offers the opportunity to free-ride, the other two are placebo treatments. We compare results within subjects. In the free-riding treatment,...