Charitable Giving in the Laboratory: Advantages of the Piecewise Linear Public Goods Game

Abstract

The vast majority of US households make significant charitable contributions. When examining the effectiveness of the mechanisms fundraisers use to solicit such funds, it is often essential that researchers elicit or control the donor’s return from giving. While much can be gained from examining data on actual donations, insights on giving increasingly result from laboratory studies. An advantage of the laboratory is that it permits control of the donor’s return from giving and thus facilitates the identification of donor motives as well as their responses to different fundraising or solicitation strategies (see Vesterlund 2016 for a review).