Subsidizing Unit Donations: Matches, Rebates, and Discounts Compared [Dataset]

DOI

An influential result in the literature on charitable giving is that matching subsidies dominate rebate subsidies in raising funds. We investigate whether this result extends to "unit donation" schemes, a popular alternative form of soliciting donations. There, the donors' choices are over the number of units of a charitable good to fund at a given unit price, rather than the amount of money to give. Comparing matches and rebates as well as simple discounts on the unit price, we find no evidence of dominance in our online experiment: The three subsidy types are equally effective overall. At a more disaggregated level, rebates lead to a higher likelihood of giving while matching and discount subsidies lead to larger donations by donors. This suggests that charities using a unit donation scheme enjoy additional degrees of freedom in choosing a subsidy type. Rebates merit additional consideration if the primary goal is to attract donors.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.11588/data/GANTNY
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-021-09732-9
Metadata Access https://heidata.uni-heidelberg.de/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.11588/data/GANTNY
Provenance
Creator Diederich, Johannes; Eckel, Catherine C.; Epperson, Raphael; Goeschl, Timo; Grossman, Philip J.
Publisher heiDATA
Contributor Diederich, Johannes; heiDATA: Heidelberg Research Data Repository
Publication Year 2021
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Diederich, Johannes (Heidelberg University)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/x-stata-syntax; type/x-r-syntax; text/tab-separated-values; text/plain; image/tiff; application/x-stata-ado; application/pdf; application/zip
Size 16998; 8847; 6000; 2097; 19725; 12193; 198425; 631671; 2896; 48681; 92; 60983; 125400; 1256; 1386; 1332; 1581; 13591; 3707; 266; 722; 133; 374930; 290; 162023; 315470; 36489; 156755
Version 1.1
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences