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Category: Project

Description: We partnered with Alaska’s Pick.Click.Give. program to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to examine two of the main motivations for charitable giving – concerns for the benefits to self (impure altruism or “warm-glow”) or concerns for the benefits to others (pure altruism). Our empirical results highlight the relative import of appeals to self: individuals who received such an appeal were 6.6% more likely to give and gave 23% more than counterparts in the control group. Yet, a message that instead appealed to recipient benefits (motivated by altruism) had no effect on average donations relative to the control group. We also find evidence of long-run effects of warm glow appeals in the subsequent year. Our results have import for theoreticians and empiricists interested in modeling charitable giving as well as practitioners and policymakers.