Heuristics and Biases in Charity
نویسندگان
چکیده
We consider utilitarian models of altruism constrained by limited willingness to sacrifice self-interest. By these models donors should strive to maximize the good they do, within the constraint. We describe several departures from predictions of these models and provide new data on some of them, based on studies conducted on the World Wide Web. We find: people focus on minimizing operating costs even when minimizing such costs reduces total benefit; they attend to average benefit per dollar rather than marginal benefit; they diversify their contributions even when benefit is maximized by giving everything to the best charity; they prefer voluntary charity to more effective “forced charity” (i.e., taxes); and they are biased toward causes in their own nation. We discuss other biases that are covered in other chapters, such as identifiability of victims. We suggest possible “nudges” to encourage people to maximize the good they do within the constraints on their self-sacrifice. ∗For conference on “Experimental approaches to the study of charitable giving,” Princeton, July 13–14, 2007. Supported by a grant from the U.S.-Israel Bi-national Science Foundation (Ilana Ritov, co-PI). Email: [email protected]
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