A Chinese Auction is one of the most popular mechanisms at charity or other fundraising events. In a Chinese Auction, bidders buy lottery tickets, which are essentially chances to win items. Bidders may buy as many tickets as they like, and bid them on any item(s) they want by placing them in a basket or other container in front of the item(s) they are trying to win. At the conclusion of biddin...

Unconditional generosity in humans is a puzzle. One possibility is that individuals benefit from being seen as generous if there is competition for access to partners and if generosity is a costly-and therefore reliable-signal of partner quality [1-3]. The "competitive helping" hypothesis predicts that people will compete to be the most generous, particularly in the presence of attractive poten...

Compared to mature investment firms, first-time funds in private equity lack an investment and performance track record, and require alternative signals to establish initial trust with investors. The paper finds that investors allocate more capital to first-time funds if they have a higher share of managers with relevant experience, such as from another private equity group or a bank. In partic...

Starting up a new lab is of a course a great challenge, but few young PIs will realize that getting started is the easy part. Indeed, once the lab is up and running, and hopefully doing very well, a whole new set of challenges emerges on top of the typical ones like fund raising and paper publication. Perhaps most dauntingly, you’ll be expected to manage the different people in your group, buil...

High-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) concentration is essential in the determination of coronary heart disease (CHD) risk in women. This is especially true in the postmenopausal state, where lipid profiles and CHD risk mimic that of age-matched men. Thus, interventions designed to reduce CHD risk by raising HDL-C levels may have particular significance during the transition to menopause...

Although many think campaign donations buy influence from legislators, scholars have difficulty determining whether and how much influence contributions have in the legislative process. Many studies seek to identify the influence of donors on roll call votes. After considerable debate most scholars have concluded that donors have little influence on these votes. What voting studies cannot detec...

Matching and Challenge Gifts to Charity: Evidence from Laboratory and Natural Field Experiments This study designs a natural field experiment linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine the effectiveness of matching gifts and challenge gifts, two popular strategies used to secure a portion of the $200 billion annually given to charities. We find evidence that challenge gifts positiv...

Businesses and green activists seek to influence public attention to the social impacts of a sector—they play salience games. An activist allocates funds between campaigning against a polluting industry and other environmental projects. When public attention is scarce, a greater campaign orientation induces industry to invest more heavily in symbolic action that cloaks damage and reduces the ri...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES The key to HIV/STI control is community-wide intervention (CWI) which depends heavily on continuous monitoring and evaluation. Unfortunately, comprehensive CWI assessment methodology and reports are generally lacking. This study developed, applied, and evaluated a rapid tool for assessing CWI in China. METHODS A total of 120 county level respondents in charge of county-w...

Much charitable giving takes place in the context of existing social groups (workplaces, churches, friends and family). We exploit a real-world setting (online fundraising) to provide the first evidence on how the size of the social group affects donations. We show that the number of Facebook friends of individual charity fundraisers has a negative effect on average donation size. This is consi...