Giving versus taking for a cause

This study focuses on subjects willingness to give to and take from a charity. We implement a real donation Dictator Game with initial endowments allocated in one of two ways: all to the subjects or all to the charity. Subjects are allowed to redistribute the endowments as they wish. We find that the initial allocation is irrelevant; final donations to the charities are nearly identical, in sharp contrast to similar research with an anonymous student recipient. Our findings imply that such framing no longer matters when a charity is substituted for an anonymous individual in the dictator setting.