Cultivating Altruism in Market Economy: The Case of Gongyi Baobei in Taobao

We often associate self-sufficient farming life with honesty and kindness and market economy with selfishness and ruthlessness. Is this true? Does market economy harm morality? Literature gives some different conclusions. Previous studies have found that people are willing to pay more to save a mouse’s life in a non-market environment than in a market environment (Falk and Szech, 2013) and people increase donations to vaccines in non-market economy (Kirchler et al., 2015); on the other hand, it has been found that the willingness to pay for products above the minimum wage is indifferent in a market environment or in a non-market environment (Pigors and Rockenbach, 2016) and people are even more willing to pay for reducing pollution in a market economy (Bartling et al., 2014). Most of the studies take the form of laboratory or questionnaire surveys of on willingness to pay for moral behavior. We plan to study whether the market economy can cultivate altruism through field experiments.
“Gongyi Baobei” is a donation project in Taobao. Taobao sellers can choose to label the products as “Gongyi Baobei” and can freely choose the amount of donations and donation projects. After the transaction is finished, the Taobao system will automatically donate a certain amount from the transaction amount to the charity organization. In 2017, there were 1.78 million selllers who donated from “Gongyi Baobei” on the Taobao platform, and the total amount of donations reached 246 million RMB (35 million US dollar). We plan to give buyers and sellers some random information about “Gongyi Baobei” and study the impact of this information on their altruistic tendencies.