Jackpot for Good: Can Lottery Matches Increase Charitable Giving?
Can lottery matching gifts accruing to the charity (instead of raffles benefiting the donors) increase charitable donations? We recruit 1,402 online participants to donate to hunger-related charities from a 10-token endowment under different matching conditions. We confirm earlier results that a 1:1 match increases giving over no match, and a 2:1 match does not. But, a lottery match to the charity with a 1% chance of 100 tokens works equally well as a 1:1 match, and, importantly, a 0.5% chance of 100 tokens match also works equally well, allowing for matching funds to go twice as far.
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Copy CitationAmelia Ahles, Joanna Lahey, and Marco A. Palma, "Jackpot for Good: Can Lottery Matches Increase Charitable Giving?," NBER Working Paper 34022 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34022.Download Citation
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