Working Paper: NBER ID: w20497
Authors: Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm; Lise Vesterlund; Huan Xie
Abstract: The extant experimental design to investigate warm glow and altruism elicits a single measure of crowd-out. Not recognizing that impure altruism predicts crowd-out is a function of giving-by-others, this design's power to reject pure altruism varies with the level of giving-by-others, and it cannot identify the strength of warm glow and altruism preferences. These limitations are addressed with a new design that elicits crowd-out at a low and at a high level of giving-by-others. Consistent with impure altruism we find decreasing crowd-out as giving-by-others increases. However warm glow is weak in our experiment and altruism largely explains why people give.
Keywords: Altruism; Charitable Giving; Crowdout; Experimental Design
JEL Codes: C92; H41
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| crowdout (D26) | impure altruism model (D64) |
| altruism (D64) | giving behavior (D64) |
| level of giving by others (D64) | crowdout (D26) |