Independent vs. Collaborative Fundraising: Understanding the Role of Information

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2019-02

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Eckel, Catherine, Begum Guney, and Neslihan Uler. 2019. Independent vs. Collaborative Fundraising: Understanding the Role of Information. University of Maryland, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics Working Papers, WP 19-01.

Abstract

We use “real donation” laboratory experiments to compare independent fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive sequentially to potential donors, with collaborative fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive simultaneously. We find that collaborative fundraising generates significantly larger total donations compared to independent fundraising. We show that the order of requests affects the level of donations only in independent fundraising; in particular, participants donated larger amounts to charities whose requests arrived earlier. We then test whether these differences might be explained by the informational asymmetry between these two fundraising mechanisms by varying the information received by the subjects.

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