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DOI: 10.1007/s11238-011-9245-8
¤ OpenAccess: Green
This work has “Green” OA status. This means it may cost money to access on the publisher landing page, but there is a free copy in an OA repository.

Reputation and influence in charitable giving: an experiment

David Reinstein,Gerhard Riener

Generosity
Reputation
Donation
2011
Previous experimental and observational work suggests that people act more generously when they are observed and observe others in social settings. However, the explanation for this is unclear. An individual may want to send a signal of her generosity to improve her own reputation. Alternately (or additionally) she may value the public good or charity itself and, believing that contribution levels are strategic complements, give more to influence others to give more. We perform the first series of laboratory experiments that can separately estimate the impact of these two social effects, and test whether realized influence is consistent with the desire to influence, and whether either of these are consistent with anticipated influence. Our experimental subjects were given the opportunity to contribute from their endowment to Bread for the World, a development NGO. Depending on treatment, “leader” subjects’ donations were reported to other subjects either anonymously or with their identities, and these were reported either before these “follower” subjects made their donation decisions. We find that “leaders” are influential only when their identities are revealed along with their donations, and female leaders are more influential than males. Identified leaders’ predictions suggest that are aware of their influence. They respond to this by giving more than either the control group or the unidentified leaders. We find mixed evidence for “reputation-seeking.”
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    Reputation and influence in charitable giving: an experiment” is a paper by David Reinstein Gerhard Riener published in 2011. It has an Open Access status of “green”. You can read and download a PDF Full Text of this paper here.