Although research has established that receiving expressions of gratitude increases prosocial behavior, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that mediate this effect. We propose that gratitude expressions can enhance prosocial behavior through both agentic and communal mechanisms, such that when helpers are thanked for their efforts, they experience stronger feelings of self-effic...

Campaigns and political parties are faced with the immensely important practical challenge of financing their efforts. Raising money is instrumental to all other aims. In recent years, this task has been complicated by the need to enlist ever greater numbers of contributors to raise ever larger sums of money. At the same time, fundraising burdens are eased a bit because contributors flock toget...

Laboratory researchers in economics assiduously protect the confidentiality of subjects. Why? Presumably because they fear that the social consequences of identifying subjects and their choices would significantly alter the economic incentives of the game. But these may be the same social effects that institutions, like charitable fund-raising, are manipulating to help overcome free riding and ...

Policy differences in the treatment of corporations and nonprofit private corporate foundations raise several issues of interest to those who administer and receive donations, as well as those who hope to augment government funds with private charitable donations. Of the $6 billion donated by corporations to charity in 1994, approximately one-fourth came through corporate foundations. What dete...

We present evidence from a natural field experiment and structural model designed to shed light on the efficacy of alternative fundraising schemes. In conjunction with the Bavarian State Opera, we mailed 25,000 opera attendees a letter describing a charitable fundraising project organized by the opera house. Recipients were randomly assigned to six treatments designed to explore behavioral resp...

People respond to those who ask. Within the charitable fundraising community, the power of the ask represents the backbone of most fundraising strategies. Despite this, the optimal design of communication strategies has received less formal attention. For their part, economists have recently explored how communication affects empathy, altruism, and giving rates to charities. Our study takes a s...

In this paper, I discuss the properties of raising constructions in Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken in Central Asia. Uyghur exhibits Raising of genitive subjects, which I argue are structurally case-marked. This makes untenable the Activity Condition proposed by Chomsky (1998, 2001). Genitive case assignment to subjects of embedded CPs in Uyghur is also in conflict with the strong version of t...

Right Node Raising is the term used by linguists to refer to a construction in which a shared argument surfaces at the right periphery of a coordinate structure (e.g. Phil loves, but Mary hates, Greek tragedies). This paper begins by introducing some of the basic properties of this construction, and then moves on to present and compare two of the main approaches to analyzing this construction. ...

ing away from certain complications that we explore in subsequent sections, we derive the meaning in (102b) for the the copy raising example in (102a) and the meaning in (103b) for the related perceptual resemblance example in (103a): (102) a. John seems to me like he’s upset. b. ∃s .seem(s , upset(john)) ∧ PSOURCE = john ∧ PGOAL = speaker (103) a. John sounds to me like he’s upset. b. ∃s .soun...

The representation of Neg-Raising in the grammar is a matter of controversy. I provide evidence for representing Neg-Raising as a kind of presupposition associated with certain predicates by providing a detailed analysis of NPI-licensing in Neg-Raising contexts. Specific features of presupposition projection are used to explain the licensing of strict NPIs under Neg-Raising predicates. Discussi...