This patient perspective piece presents an important case at the intersection of mobile health technology, mental health, and innovation. The potential of digital technologies to advance mental health is well known, although the challenges are being increasingly recognized. Making mobile health work for mental health will require broad collaborations. We already know that those who experience m...

Private providers of public goods, such as charities, invariably enlist fund-raisers to organize and collect contributions. Common in charitable fund-raising is seed money, either from a government grant or from a group of ‘‘leadership givers,’’ that launches the fund drive and generates additional gifts. This paper provides a theoretical basis for fund-raisers and seeds to charity. The primary...

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

The contentious whaling dispute can be described as a scientific dispute over resource management, the collision between nations that regard whales as food and nations that see whales as special, political game played by politicians who like to be seen as environmentally conscious by opposing whaling, and economic interests of the whaling industry and fundraising anti-whaling organizations. All...

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...