Volunteer hiring, organizational form and the provision of mission-oriented goods

Mission-oriented organizations, such as nonprofit organizations and NGOs, rely critically on volunteer recruitment to achieve their organizational goals. Besides serving as an outlet of altruistic motives, volunteering often acts as a stepping-stone for a paid position in the nonprofit sector. This paper provides an explanation for the fact that nonprofit employers are uniquely able to attract such volunteers with social concerns and career aspirations and for the related observation that nonprofits figure prominently in mission-related activities. Our theory is predicated on that - by committing to not distributing profits - nonprofit incorporation relaxes the incentive constraint that employers face when implicitly contracting with volunteers, without relying on ex ante differences in workers' preferences over the employer's identity or inherent asymmetries between nonprofit and for-profit providers. The not-for-profit commitment is shown to be effective only in activities where producers, who can choose to be for-profit or nonprofit, care about the level or quality of the service being provided. Thus, in the equilibrium of the model developed here nonprofit entry in sectors where missions play a defining role and the hiring of volunteers arise endogenously due to economic forces. This equilibrium outcome has some desirable welfare properties. Keywords; volunteers, nonprofit institutions, privately provided public goods

An experimental investigation of intrinsic motivations for giving

This paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying the two intrinsic motivations for giving: warm glow and pure altruism. In particular, we implemented a within-subject experimental design with three treatments: (i) one, where the recipient is the experimenters, which measures altruistic feelings towards the experimenters (T1), (ii) the Crumpler and Grossman (2008) design in which the recipient is a charity, and the dictator's donation crowds out one-for-one a donation by the experimenters, which aims at measuring warm glow giving (T2), (iii) a third one, with a charity recipient and no crowding out, which elicits both types of altruism (T3). We use T1 to assess to what extent altruistic feelings towards the experimenters are a potential confound for measuring warm glow in T2. We find giving in T1 not to be significantly different from T2, suggesting that the Crumpler and Grossman test is an upper bound estimate of warm glow giving. We provide a lower bound estimate based on the behavior of subjects whose estimate of warm glow giving in T2 is not confounded, that is, those who do not display altruistic feelings towards the experimenters in T1. We use these two estimates to decompose giving in T3 into warm glow and pure altruism and find them to be almost equally important. We also propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive (RLI) scheme, such as the one employed here, warm glow benefits accumulate and may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not

Disentangling the Sources of Pro-social Behavior in the Workplace: A Field Experiment

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers’ pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces action-oriented altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find that action-oriented altruism accounts for a significant increase in effort, while there is no additional impact due to output-oriented altruism. We also find significant gender-related differences in the treatment effect: women are very responsive to the treatment condition eliciting action-oriented altruism, while men’s behavior is not affected by any of the treatments.pro-social behavior, field experiment, effort, charitable donations

An Experimental Investigation of Intrinsic Motivations for Giving

This paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying the two intrinsic motivations for giving: warm glow and pure altruism. In particular, we implemented a within-subject experimental design with three treatments: (i) one, T1, where the recipient is the experimenters, which measures altruistic feelings towards the experimenters, (ii) the Crumpler and Grossman (2008) design, T2, in which the recipient is a charity, and the dictator’s donation crowds out one-for-one a donation by the experimenters, which aims at measuring warm glow giving, (iii) a third one, T3, with a charity recipient and no crowding out, which elicits both types of altruism. We use T1 to assess to what extent altruistic feelings towards the experimenters are a potential confound for measuring warm glow in T2. We find giving in T1 not to be significantly different from T2, suggesting that the Crumpler and Grossman design provides an upper bound estimate of warm glow giving. We provide a lower bound estimate based on the behavior of subjects whose warm glow giving in T2 is not confounded, that is, those who do not display altruistic feelings towards the experimenters in T1. We use these two estimates to quantify the portion of giving in T3 due to pure altruism and find it to be between 20% and 26% of endowment. We also propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive (RLI) scheme, such as the one we employ, warm glow accumulates and this may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not.dictator game, warm glow, pure altruism, charitable giving, random lottery, incentive scheme

The long-lived effects of historic climate on the wealth of nations

We investigate the long-run consequences of historic, climatic temperatures (1730-2000) for the modern cross-country income distribution. Using a newly constructed dataset of climatic temperatures stretching over three centuries (18th, 19th, and 20th), we estimate a robust and significant time-varying, non-monotonic effect of climatic temperature upon current incomes for a cross-section of 167 countries. We find a large, positive effect of 18th century climatic temperature and an even larger, negative effect of 19th century climatic temperature upon current incomes. When historic, climatic temperature is introduced, the effect of 20th century climatic temperature on current income is either weakly positive or insignificant. Our findings are robust to various sub-samples, additional geographic controls, and alternative income measures. The negative relationship between current, climatic temperature and current income that is commonly estimated appears to reflect the long-run effect of climatic variations in the 18th and 19th centuries. <br><br> Keywords; climate, temperature, economic performance, geography, history JEL codes: N50, O11, O40, O50, O57

Changing guards: time to move beyond Body Mass Index for population monitoring of excess adiposity

With the obesity epidemic, and the effects of aging populations, human phenotypes have changed over two generations, possibly more dramatically than in other species previously. As obesity is an important and growing hazard for population health, we recommend a systematic evaluation of the optimal measure(s) for population-level excess body fat. Ideal measure(s) for monitoring body composition and obesity should be simple, as accurate and sensitive as possible, and provide good categorisation of related health risks. Combinations of anthropometric markers or predictive equations may facilitate better use of anthropometric data than single measures to estimate body composition for populations. Here we provide new evidence that increasing proportions of aging populations are at high health-risk according to waist circumference, but not body mass index (BMI), so continued use of BMI as the principal population-level measure substantially underestimates the health-burden from excess adiposity

A survey experiment on information, inattention and online privacy

Personal data lie at the forefront of different business models and constitute the main source of revenue of several online companies. In many cases, consumers may have incomplete information or may be inattentive about the digital transactions of their data. This paper investigates whether highlighting positive or negative aspects of online privacy policies, thereby mitigating the informational problem, can affect consumers’ privacy actions and attitudes. Results of an online survey experiment indicate that participants adopt a more conservative stance on disclosing sensitive and identifiable information, even when positive attitudes of companies towards their privacy are made salient, compared to when privacy is not mentioned. On the other hand, they do not change their attitudes and social actions towards privacy. These findings suggest that privacy behavior is not necessarily sensitive to exposure to objective threats or benefits of disclosing personal information. Rather, people are inattentive and their dormant privacy concerns may manifest only when consumers are asked to think about privacy.publishersversionpublishe

“Now that you mention it”: a survey experiment on information, salience and online privacy

Personal data lie at the forefront of different business models and constitute the main source of revenue of several online companies. In many cases, consumers have incomplete information about the digital transactions of their data. This paper investigates whether highlighting positive or negative aspects of online privacy, thereby mitigating the informational problem, can affect consumers’ privacy actions and attitudes. Results of two online survey experiments indicate that participants adopt a more conservative stance on disclosing identifiable information, such as name and email, even when they are informed about positive attitudes of companies towards their privacy. On the other hand, they do not change their attitudes and social actions towards privacy. These findings suggest that privacy concerns are dormant and may manifest when consumers are asked to think about privacy; and that privacy behavior is not necessarily sensitive to exposure to objective threats or benefits of disclosing personal information

Scared or naïve? An exploratory study on users perceptions of online privacy disclosures

Online service providers offer “free” services in exchange for the personal data of its users. In the last few years there has been an increase of online industry regulations requiring service providers, such as websites and app developers, to disclosure the ways in which they collect, process and use the personal data of service users. These “privacy disclosures,” such as the privacy policy, the cookie notice and, on smart phones, the app permission request, are designed with the purpose of informing users and empowering them to control their privacy. The interaction problems with these different types of disclosure are relatively well understood – habituation, inattention and cognitive biases undermine the extent to which user consent is truly informed. Users understanding of the actual content of these disclosures, and their feelings toward it, are less well understood, though. In this paper we report the results of a mixed-method exploratory study of the privacy disclosures and compare their relative merits as a starting point for the development of more meaningful consent interactions. First, we conducted a focus group study, with 21 students from the University of Southampton, to understand behavior and privacy concerns of Millenials (those born between 1982 and 2004) in response to the these three most common types of privacy disclosure. Second, we conducted an online survey, with 100 students from the University of Southampton, to study perception and feelings towards the content of the privacy disclosures. We identify three key findings. Firstly, we find heterogeneity of user perceptions and attitudes to privacy disclosures in both studies. The results of the focus groups suggests three types of users: the scared and worried about their online privacy, who think there is an option out; the naïve, who do not understand how their personal data is collected and processed by the online service providers; and the meh, who understand the trade off but are not worried about their privacy. Secondly, we find limited ability of users to infer data processing outputs and risks based on technical explanations of particular practices, suggestions of a naïve model of “cost justification” rather cost-benefit analysis by users. Finally, we show evidence of the possibility that consent interactions are valuable in themselves as a mean to improve user perceptions of a servic