The Impacts of Lottery Matching on Charitable Giving

Individuals make allocations between themselves and a specified charity with a treatment-dependent lottery match to the charity. We will investigate 4 lottery matching schemes and 2 comparison treatments (no match and 1:1 match)

Treatments:
1. No-Match
2. 1:1: Match Donate 1 token, guaranteed organization donation of 1 token (EV = 1 token)
3. 10% of 10 tokens Donate: 1 token, 10% chance organization donation of 10 tokens (EV = 1 token)
4. 1% of 100 tokens Donate: 1 token, 1% chance organization donation of 100 tokens (EV = 1 token)
5. 1% of 50 tokens Donate: 1 token, 1% chance organization donation of 50 tokens (EV = 0.5 token)
6. 0.5% of 100 tokens Donate: 1 token, 0.5% chance organization donation of 100 tokens (EV = 0.5 token)
Note: 1 token is $0.50
Every participant will be able to select a charity from a provided list for their donation.
We would provide a list of agricultural charities (see Table 4) and a brief description of each
charity’s work. Participants will select one of the charities they wish to donate to via their
allocation decision task.
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2024-04-29

2024-06-01

Donation Amount (i.e., amount of allocation given to charity vs. self).

Estimate how the treatments impacted individual's allocations for self vs. charity based on the endowment allocation between the two.

We will be comparing charitable giving match scheme with alternative lottery

Participants will be randomly assigned to a treatment. The first page of the experiment will be the informed consent. Conditional on participants consenting to participate in the study, subjects will enter the rest of the study and be randomly assigned a treatment. Treatments will be stratified by gender to ensure a balanced sample of men and women by treatment. Participants will first read the instructions and associated examples. Participants will be given a list of 3 hunger-related charities and brief descriptions of each (see script). Participants are told they will complete the decision allocation task for each of the charities and one will be randomly selected to be binding. Participants will receive a 10 token endowment (each token = $0.50) and be asked to allocate that endowment between themselves and each charity. Participants will see the charities in a random order. After the three decision allocation tasks the participants will complete a brief questionnaire. Participants will then discover which charity was selected to be binding. If participants are in one of the lottery treatments they will spin a lottery wheel to determine the outcome of the lottery match. After the participant learns the match outcome, the study will conclude with a payment information page and then a link to the website where participants can see certificates of donations. The website link serves to allow participants to check that the donation they allocated was made (and reinforce that no deception is used in this study) while maintaining participant anonymity.

Treatments randomized via oTree code when study is initialized.

individual

No

1200 individuals

1200 (approximately)

Approximately 1200 total with 100 per cell. We will stratify by gender and treatment for each cell. 6 treatments x 2 genders = 12 cells

Power calculations show a minimum of 69 per cell. Based on this effect size, we will need a sample size between 69 and 114 subjects per cell. To investigate any potential gender differences that may influence our 6 treatments we will stratify by gender, effectively implementing a 2x6 design for 12 cells.