TY - JOUR AU - DellaVigna,Stefano AU - List,John A. AU - Malmendier,Ulrike TI - Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15629 PY - 2009 Y2 - December 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15629 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15629.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Stefano DellaVigna University of California, Berkeley Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Tel: 510/643-0715 Fax: 510/642-6615 E-Mail: sdellavi@econ.berkeley.edu John List Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 301/405-1288 Fax: 301/314-9091 E-Mail: jlist@uchicago.edu Ulrike Malmendier Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall # 3880 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Tel: 510-642-5038 E-Mail: ulrike@econ.berkeley.edu AB - Every year, 90 percent of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, e.g., due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, e.g., due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raising drive in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their door-knobs; thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 10 to 25 percent and, if the flyer allows checking a `Do Not Disturb' box, reduces giving by 30 percent. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.5 for an in-state charity and $1.4 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower utility of the potential donors. ER -