Active Decisions and Pro-social Behavior: A Field Experiment in Blood Donations
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked either to consent actively to or reject some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences while simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested in a large-scale field experiment in blood donation. We find that this "active-decision" intervention substantially increases the stated willingness to donate blood as well as actual donation behavior for people who had previously not formed preferences fully. JEL classification: C93, D64, I18
منابع مشابه
Will There Be Blood? Incentives and Substitution Effects in Pro-social Behavior
Will There Be Blood? Incentives and Substitution Effects in Pro-social Behavior We examine how economic incentives affect pro-social behavior through the analysis of a unique dataset with information on more than 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives. Our findings are consistent with blood donors responding to incentives in a “standard” way; offering donors economic incentives significantly in...
متن کاملActive Decisions and Prosocial Behaviour: a Field Experiment on Blood Donation*
Assigning a subjective value to a contribution to a public good often requires reflection. For many reasons, this reflection may be put off, reinforcing the underprovision of public goods. We hypothesise that nudging individuals to reflect on whether to contribute to a public good leads to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences. The hypothesis is tested in a large-scale field ex...
متن کاملLife or Death Decisions: Framing the Call for Help
BACKGROUND Chronic blood shortages in the U.S. would be alleviated by small increases, in percentage terms, of people donating blood. The current research investigated the effects of subtle changes in charity-seeking messages on the likelihood of people responses to a call for help. We predicted that "avoid losses" messages would lead to more helping behavior than "promote gains" messages would...
متن کاملSelf-Signaling and Pro-Social Behavior: a cause marketing mobile field experiment1
We test a self-signaling theory using two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments. Mobile phone users are randomly sampled to receive promotional offers for movie tickets via SMS technology. Test groups are exposed to different pre-determined levels of price discounts and charitable donations tied to the ticket purchase. The main effects of price discounts and charitable donations ...
متن کاملSocial Image Concerns and Pro-Social Behavior
Social Image Concerns and Pro-Social Behavior Using longitudinal data on the entire population of blood donors in an Italian town, we examine how donors respond to an award scheme which rewards them with “medals” when they reach certain donation quotas. Our results indicate that donors significantly increase the frequency of their donations immediately before reaching the thresholds for which t...
متن کامل