Decomposing desert and tangibility effects in a charitable giving experiment

Reinstein, David and Riener, Gerhard (2012) Decomposing desert and tangibility effects in a charitable giving experiment. Experimental Economics, 15 (1), 229-240. (doi:10.1007/s10683-011-9298-0).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Several papers have documented that when subjects play with standard laboratory "endowments" they make less self-interested choices than when they use money they have either earned through a laboratory task or brought from outside the lab. In the context of a charitable giving experiment we decompose this into two common artifacts of the laboratory: the intangibility of money (or experimental currency units) promised on a computer screen relative to cash in hand, and the distinct treatment of random "windfall" gains relative to earned money. While both effects are found to be significant in non-parametric tests, the former effect, which has been neglected in previous studies, has a stronger impact on total donations, while the latter effect has a greater impact on the probability of donating. These results have clear implications for experimental design, and also suggest that the availability of more abstract payment methods may increase other-regarding behavior in the field.

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Published date: March 2012

Additional Information: Funding Information: Acknowledgements We would like to thank the British Academy and the Deutsche Forschungsgemein-schaft under the grant RTG 1411 for providing financial support for our research. We would also like to thank the many colleagues, seminar participants and participants at the 2009 TIBER symposium who have offered us valuable advice and comments. Liutauras Petrucionis provided excellent research assistance.

Keywords: Altruism, Charitable giving, Experimental methodology, House money effect, Individual choice, Public goods, Tangibility