We experimentally investigate the gap between willingness to pay and willingness to donate in the context of the promotion of green electricity. The experiment involves two differing scenarios (public choice versus individual choice) and two distinct public payment vehicles (direct tax versus...

The authors examine data on giving and volunteering to determine whether public provision of social services and other public goods affects donations of time and money and provides evidence of crowding out. They find a negative and statistically significant relationship between government...

We study the compatibility of the optimal population size concepts produced by different social welfare functions and egalitarianism meant as “equal consumption for all individuals of all generations”. Social welfare functions are parameterized by an altruism parameter generating the...

We design an experiment to test whether incomplete crowding out in dictator games can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic preferences. By giving the recipients an endowment of varying levels, we create an environment in which crowding out may occur. We find that the behavior of 66% of the...

We investigate the consequences of a pure income effect on the altruistic behavior of donors. Inequality aversion theories predict either no effect or a decrease in giving, whereas impure altruism theory predicts an increase in giving with an increase in the common income of donor and receiver....

We show that, if giving is equivalent to not taking, impure altruism could account for List’s (in Journal of Political Economy 115(3):482–493, <CitationRef CitationID="CR16">2007</CitationRef>) finding that the payoff to recipients in a dictator game decreases when the dictator has the option to take. We examine behavior in dictator...</citationref>

People respond to those who ask. Within the charitable fundraising community, the power of the ask represents the backbone of most fundraising strategies. Despite this, the optimal design of communication strategies has received less formal attention. For their part, economists have recently...