We examine two different ways to subsidize charitable giving: by a rebate (returning a portion of the donation to the giver) or by a match (adding additional donations to the giver's donation). In previous experimental research, we have shown that participants give more to charity under the...

We report results of an experiment designed to assess the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the pattern and level of charitable contributions of donors. The study includes an experimental measure of charitable giving and targets three charities: the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and Oxfam...

We report the results of a field experiment conducted in conjunction with a mailed fundraising campaign of a nonprofit organization. The experiment is designed to compare the response of donors to subsidies in the form of matching amounts or rebated amounts. Matching subsidies are used by many...

We develop and evaluate a simple gamble-choice task to measure attitudes toward risk, and apply this measure to examine differences in risk attitudes of male and female university students. In addition, we examine stereotyping by asking whether a person's sex is read as a signal of risk...

An individual should be indifferent between a rebate subsidy of rate sr and a matching subsidy of rate sm=sr/(1-sr), and the total amount received by the charity should be the same regardless of subsidy type. Recent laboratory and field experiments contradict these straightforward predictions of...

Recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that a component of Fischer (1935)'s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. The importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, but researchers' incentives are not sufficient to encourage...

While the causes for upward income mobility have received considerable attention, the behavioral impact of the prospect of mobility has been largely overlooked. Using a survey and experiment, we investigate if the prospect of mobility influences antisocial behavior. In our experiment, low- and...

This paper compares the effectiveness of rebate and matching subsidies in the field and, to our knowledge, is the first to control for potential bias introduced by the failure to account for donors' awareness of the offered subsidies. Where previous field experiments have typically been limited...

Many Americans hold erroneous beliefs regarding the level of inequality in the United States and the efforts the federal government makes to alleviate poverty. In general, they overestimate the extent of poverty relief undertaken by government. Given that poverty relief programs are a public...

Giving (warm-glow plus purely altruistic giving) in the dictator game has been shown to vary with the nature of the endowment (house versus earned money), the action set (giving only versus the option to take), and the type of recipient (anonymous participants versus a charity). The contribution...