We consider the task of automatically identifying participants’ motivations in the public health campaign Movember and investigate the impact of the different motivations on the amount of campaign donations raised. Our classification scheme is based on the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (van Zomeren et al., 2008). We find that automatic classification based on Movember profiles is f...

What would happen if the current US campaign …nance system, mostly based on private donations, were replaced by a public funding scheme of the same magnitude? It has been argued that public funding would deprive voters of useful information, but this can only be true if private donations are somehow targeted to ‘better’candidates. Using a survey-based dataset about the e¤ectiveness of state leg...

Charitable giving is an important source of funding for overseas development and emergency relief. Donations in the UK are about a quarter of the size of government development aid. There has been strong growth over time, reflecting the activities of development charities and the public response to humanitarian emergencies. The paper examines how this charitable giving has changed since 1978, u...

The Public Health Service (PHS) has recommended a multifaceted approach to blood safety in the United States that includes stringent donor selection practices and the use of screening tests. Blood donations in the United States have been screened for antibody to human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) since March 1985 and type 2 (HIV-2) since June 1992. An estimated one in 450,000 to one in...

It is now an annual custom with us to notice the report of the Aboo Lawrence School, and to urge its claims for assistance upon the benevolent public. The report for the year 1876-77 has now come to hand, and we are sorry to see that up to 31st March 1877, there was a deficit of Bs. 3,193-3-6. The subscriptions from the public towards current expenditure amounted to P,s. 2,664-13-0, and the don...

Public recreation land management agencies have been searching for ways to increase revenue. User fees as implemented by the Fee Demonstration Program have received the most attention. Corporate sponsorships and private donations have also been implemented and other options, such as partial privatization, closure of some areas, and different forms of public-private partnerships have been debate...

Suggested contributions, membership categories, and discrete, incremental thank-you gifts are devices often used by benevolent associations that provide public goods. Such devices focus donations into discrete levels, thereby effectively limiting the donors’ freedom to give. We study the effects on overall donations of the tradeoff between rigid schemes that severely restrict the choices of con...

BACKGROUND National blood donation screening for West Nile virus (WNV) started in June 2003, after the documentation of WNV transfusion-associated transmission (TAT) in 2002. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS Blood donations were screened with investigational nucleic acid amplification assays in minipool formats. Blood collection agencies (BCAs) reported screening results to state and local public hea...

How Can Bill and Melinda Gates Increase Other People's Donations to Fund Public Goods?* We develop a simple theory which formally describes how charities can resolve the information asymmetry problems faced by small donors by working with large donors to generate quality signals. To test the model, we conducted two large-scale natural field experiments. In the first experiment, a charity focusi...