Concerns for reputation can promote cooperative behaviour. Individuals that behave cooperatively stand to benefit if they gain in influence, status or are more likely to be chosen as interaction partners by others. Most theoretical and empirical models of cooperation predict that image score will increase with cooperative contributions. Individuals are therefore expected to make higher contribu...

Modelling Charitable Donations to an Unexpected Natural Disaster: Evidence from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics Using household-level data, we explore the relationship between donations to the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and other charitable donations. The empirical evidence suggests that donations specifically for the victims of the tsunami are positively associat...

We analyze group-voting on binding minimum contributions to environmental projects and assess how such institutions affect subsequent voluntary donations. Mature tourism destinations such as the island of Majorca (Spain) suffer environmental pressures caused by decades of intense tourism development, reducing the environmental quality and tourism appeal of the island. Financed from the local ta...

Volunteering plays a prominent role in the charitable provision of goods and services, yet we know relatively little about why individuals spend time and money to the charity. Assuming that volunteering is a consumption good, we analyze the determinants of individuals’ charitable cash donations and volunteer labor as well as the interdependence between both goods. Using data from the European S...

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...

This paper tests the effect of matching charitable giving in a randomized field experiment. The students at the University of Zurich have to decide, each semester, whether they wish to contribute to two social funds. The donations of the treatment group are matched by contributions of an anonymous donor. The results support the hypothesis that a matching mechanism increases contributions to a p...

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to the primary donation decision, namely, how much to contribute to the charitable cause. The second rela...

This article examines voluntary provision of a public good that is motivated, in part, to compensate for activities that diminish the public good. Markets for environmental offsets, such as those that promote carbon neutrality, provide an increasingly salient example. An important result is that mean donations do not converge to zero as the economy grows large. The equilibrium is solved to show...

Many public goods are supported with both private and public funding. It is often argued that public funding, based on taxes, crowds out private philanthropic contributions. Agents respond to increases in taxes by decreasing their donations. However, the tax level depends on the political equilibrium arising from agents’ voting decisions. In this paper we analyze a variety of motivations for vo...