Social Image Concerns and Pro-Social Behavior

Using longitudinal data on the entire population of blood donors in an Italian town, we examine how donors respond to an award scheme which rewards them with “medals” when they reach certain donation quotas. Our results indicate that donors significantly increase the frequency of their donations immediately before reaching the thresholds for which the rewards are given, but only if the prizes are publicly announced in the local newspaper and awarded in a public ceremony. The results are robust to several specifications, sample definitions, and controls for observable and unobservable heterogeneity. Our findings are consistent with social image concerns being a primary motivator of pro-social behavior, and indicate that symbolic prizes are most effective as motivators when they are awarded publicly. Because we do not detect a reduction in donation frequency after the quotas are reached, this incentive based on social prestige leads to a net increase in the frequency of donations.incentives, awards, public good provision, pro-social behavior, public health, social prestige

Active Decisions and Pro-social Behavior: A Field Experiment on Blood Donation

In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked to either actively consent or dissent to some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences while simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested in a large-scale field experiment on blood donation. We find that this "active-decision" intervention substantially increases the actual donation behavior of people who have not fully formed preferences beforehand.active decision, pro-social behavior, field experiment, blood donation

Essays in Pro-social Behavior

This dissertation examines individuals\u27 actions to improve social outcomes when unrecoverable investments are necessary. Situations involving non-pecuniary and pecuniary investments are considered. In the former, the prerequisite of real effort - a non-pecuniary, unrecoverable investment - is examined when said effort determines an individual\u27s ability to procure their preferred social outcome. Theoretical predictions over an individual\u27s effort provision are based on their revealed preferences for the social distribution of wealth according to the general axiom of revealed preference (GARP). Laboratory experiments reveal that individuals\u27 effort provisions do not support the assumption of stable preferences (transitivity) of wealth distribution. Specifically, individuals who reveal a preference for egalitarian outcomes do not exert enough real effort toward said outcomes when all of the wealth can be distributed directly to them. In the latter, pecuniary situation, auction formats that require all bidders to pay their bid (i.e., all-pay auctions) are studied as a way of funding public goods, specifically in the context of charity auctions. An innovative theoretical variation of the war of attrition is designed. This variation requires bidders to make unrecoverable upfront investments in the auction in order to participate, and the amount of one\u27s investment dictates how much one can potentially bid in the auction. In addition, an empirical analysis of this theoretical variation is provided via laboratory experiments. These experiments seek to highlight the bidder-specific and mechanism-specific characteristics that may lead to greater success in charitable fund-raising. The results suggest that auction mechanisms with an incremental bidding design outperform mechanisms with a lump-sum bidding design

The Emotional Consequences of Pro-social Behavior in Markets

Pro-social behavior made when buying private goods is becoming increasingly popular. Several findings from behavioral and experimental economics however emphasizes that people are less pro-social in such situations, compared to pro-social decisions in non-market contexts. This paper suggests that emotional responses are important explanations of this finding. It is first argued that the emotional response to a pro-social decision combined with private good purchase is different from the response to a similar decision in a non-market situation. Through evidence from a laboratory experiment, it is then found, that deciding on a social choice in a market exchange involves a less positive emotional reaction to others, compared to non-market situations. Moreover, subjects in market contexts are found to be less responsive to other subjects’ contribution behavior, relative to the non-market contexts.Emotions; market exchange; pro-social behavior

The role of social factors in facilitating pro-social behavior among Arsi Negelle Preparatory school students, Ethiopia

The main aim of this study was to investigate the role of social factors in facilitating pro-social behavior among Arsi Negelle Preparatory school students. The research employed crosssectional research design of quantitative method. Out of 1170 grade eleven and twelve students, 299 students were selected were selected using stratified systematic random sampling technique. Descriptive statistics were computed to summarize the participants’ demographic characteristics and the most observed pro-social behavior type. Independent t -test was also used to test the significance mean difference between gender while one way ANOVA was employed to quantify the family income and parental education in facilitating pro-social behavior among students. The findings showed that among domain of pro-social behavior, complaint was the most observed pro-social behavior while altruism was the least observed pro-social behavior among students. There was a significant mean difference in score of overall pro-social behavior between male and female students. There was also statistically significant difference among respondents in their overall pro-social behavior and all types of pro-social behaviors score facilitated by their mother’s and father’s level of education. On the other hand, there was statistically insignificant difference among respondents in their overall pro-social behavior scores that can be facilitated by their family/guardian’s level of income. As a result, students were mostly involved in helping others in response to a verbal or nonverbal request. Moreover, being male or female and mother’s level of education has had an influence in involving pro-social behavior. However, family/guardian’s level of income difference has no influence in facilitating overall pro-social behavior. Based on the aforementioned implications, parents, teachers, neighbors, religious leaders, government and non-government bodies are recommended to play a role in promoting pro-social behavior among the students

Three Essays on Pro-social Behavior

In this dissertation, I study individuals’ prosocial behaviors. I focus on the topics of charitable giving, measuring altruism, and trust. The first essay studies the effectiveness of fundraising campaigns with volunteer leaders in charitable giving. We ask: 1) Does having volunteer leaders increase contributions from potential donors?, and 2) What factors increase or decrease the impact of volunteer leaders on charitable giving? We find that the effectiveness of leadership depends on the specific context. Volunteers are generally more effective in increasing follower donations, but themselves give less than randomly-selected leaders. Social distance of the leader has little effect on fundraising. The second essay is directly related to altruism, the altruistic motivation for charitable giving. Altruism has been measured in the lab using dictator games, where some scholars use only one decision and others use multiple decisions. The latter has gained remarkable popularity in identifying heterogeneous distributional preferences among populations and found the prevailing existence of preferences for efficiency relative to preferences for equality. We examine the effect of playing both roles in the dictator games with multiple decisions. We ask: 1) Does playing both roles change behavior?, and 2) If so, should we rethink the measure of distributional preferences? We find that dual role procedure distorts revealed preferences. Dual role procedure leads to greater price sensitivity, and overestimates preferences for efficiency and underestimates preferences for equality. We also find evidences that only single role measurement predicts real life giving. In the third essay we ask: 1) Does altruism explain individual trust and trustworthy behavior?, and 2) Are trust and trustworthiness norms? We find that altruism predicts trust, while both fairness and trust predict trustworthiness. Trust and trustworthiness could be explained by following norms. Our results suggest the presence of norms that elicit trusting and trustworthy behavior

From the lab to the field: envelopes, dictators and manners

Results are reported of the first natural field experiment on the dictator game, where subjects are unaware that they participate in an experiment. In contrast to predictions of the standard economic model, dictators show a large degree of pro-social behavior. This paper builds a bridge from the laboratory to the field to explore how predictive findings from the laboratory are for the field. External validity is remarkably high. In all experiments, subjects display an equally high amount of pro-social behavior, whether they are students or not, participate in a laboratory or not, or are aware that they participate in an experiment or not.altruism, natural field experiment, external validity

Loving Cultural Heritage Private Individual Giving and Prosocial Behavior

The aim of this paper is to analyse patterns of private individual giving to Cultural Heritage institutions in Italy. Based on the emerging economic literature on pro-social behavior, we carried out a Contingent Valuation survey to assess individuals’ willingness to donate to museums and heritage organizations according to different conditions and set of incentives. Our findings reveal that intrinsic motivations and accountability of the recipient institutions may be more effective drivers for eliciting charitable giving than the usually proposed fiscal incentives. The results provide avenues for future empirical research and policy suggestions for fund raising cultural institutions.Charitable Giving, Cultural Heritage, Contingent Valuation, Pro-social Behavior

Will There Be Blood? Incentives and Substitution Effects in Pro-social Behavior

We examine how economic incentives affect pro-social behavior through the analysis of a unique dataset with information on more than 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives. Our findings are consistent with blood donors responding to incentives in a "standard" way; offering donors economic incentives significantly increases turnout and blood units collected, and more so the greater the incentive's monetary value. In addition, there is no disproportionate increase in donors who come to a drive but are ineligible to donate when incentives are offered. Further evidence from a small-scale field experiment corroborates these findings and confirms that donors are motivated by the economic value of the items offered. We also find that a substantial fraction of the increase in donations due to incentives may be explained by donors substituting away from neighboring drives toward drives where rewards are offered, and the likelihood of this substitution is higher the higher the monetary value of the incentive offered and if neighboring drives do not offer incentives. Thus, extrinsic incentives motivate pro-social behavior, but unless substitution effects are also considered, the effect of incentives may be overestimated.incentives, altruism, public good provision, pro-social behavior, public health

Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences?

We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange game experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second agent's effort is influenced by the effort choice of the first agent, even though there are no material spillovers between agents. This peer effect is predicted by a model of distributional social preferences (Fehr-Schmidt, 1999). As we show from a norms-elicitation experiment, it is also consistent with social norms compliance. A conditional logit investigation of the explanatory power of payoff inequality and elicited norms finds that the second agent's effort can be best explained by the social preferences model. In further treatments with modified games we find that the presence/strength of peer effects changes as predicted by the social preferences model. As with the baseline treatment, a conditional logit analysis favors an explanation based on social preferences, rather than social norms following for these treatments. Our results suggest that, in our context, the social preferences model provides a parsimonious explanation for the observed peer effect.peer effects, social influence, gift-exchange, experiment, social preferences, inequity aversion, measuring social norms