Since campaign contributions reveal the actor’s party leanings, they take place in a domain of social observation and are likely to be subject to social effects. We conducted a field experiment to identify some of these social effects. We sent letters to 92,000 contributors from all U.S....

This paper investigates the determinants of generosity in an experiment on charity to real-life welfare recipients. It tests the effects of various measures of unconditional altruism and conditional or reciprocal altruism. The results show strong support for conditional or reciprocal altruism....

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...

This is an online appendix to Lacetera, N., Macis, M., and Slonim, R., 2013: “Rewarding Volunteers? A Field Experiment“ (Management Science, forthcoming). It contains the following materials: (1) Additional Details of the Experimental Design (pp. i-iii), and (2) Additional Analyses (pp....

An extensive literature on reputation signaling in prosocial settings has focused on an intrinsic desire for positive reputation. In our paper, we provide experimental evidence that some individuals are averse to both positive and negative reputation, and will, therefore, respond to visibility...

An influential result in the literature on charitable giving is that matching subsidies dominate rebate subsidies in raising funds. We investigate whether this result extends to 'unit donation' schemes, a popular alternative form of soliciting donations. There, the donors' choices are about the...

Recent evidence suggests that default based nudges i.e. alterations in the decisional context, can have large effects on decision making and can be used as policy interventions to improve individual and public welfare. This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment (N = 988),...

We estimate the effect of an increase in time cost on the return behavior of blood donors. Using data from the Australia Red Cross Blood Service, we ask what happens when pro-social behavior becomes more costly. Exploiting a natural variation in which donor wait times are random, we use the...