TY - JOUR
T1 - Instantaneous positive reinforcement does not increase donations
T2 - evidence from online experiments
AU - Grodeck, Ben
AU - Grossman, Philip J.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Australia Research Council (DP170101167).We are grateful to participants at the Department of Economics seminar, University of Louisville. We would like to thank Toby Handfield, Philipp Schoenegger, Marta Serra-Garcia, Nina Xue, the associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank Acer Zhou for his assistance programming the experiment.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s)
PY - 2024/6
Y1 - 2024/6
N2 - Historically, positive reinforcement (PRI) for charitable giving happens after the fact, e.g., thank-you letters and gifts from the charities to donors. With the increasing prevalence of online giving, there exists an opportunity for less costly instantaneous PRI. Our study attempts to provide proof of concept of the effectiveness of instantaneous PRI. We report evidence from two large-scale online experiments. We conducted Experiment 1 on MTurk using Cloud Research (n = 2,375) and a conceptual replication on Prolific (n = 1,572). Participants are randomly assigned to either receive no PRI, or PRI in the form of a thumbs up emoji that is either static (same size), or dynamic (varies in size with the size of the donation). Consistent with much of the findings on after-the-fact PRI, in both experiments we do not find evidence that instantaneous PRI increases donation behavior compared to the baseline. These results suggest that organizations and policymakers should be cautious when deciding to use instantaneous PRI.
AB - Historically, positive reinforcement (PRI) for charitable giving happens after the fact, e.g., thank-you letters and gifts from the charities to donors. With the increasing prevalence of online giving, there exists an opportunity for less costly instantaneous PRI. Our study attempts to provide proof of concept of the effectiveness of instantaneous PRI. We report evidence from two large-scale online experiments. We conducted Experiment 1 on MTurk using Cloud Research (n = 2,375) and a conceptual replication on Prolific (n = 1,572). Participants are randomly assigned to either receive no PRI, or PRI in the form of a thumbs up emoji that is either static (same size), or dynamic (varies in size with the size of the donation). Consistent with much of the findings on after-the-fact PRI, in both experiments we do not find evidence that instantaneous PRI increases donation behavior compared to the baseline. These results suggest that organizations and policymakers should be cautious when deciding to use instantaneous PRI.
KW - Charitable giving
KW - Experiment
KW - Fundraising
KW - Positive reinforcement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85193432606&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.04.032
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.04.032
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85193432606
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 222
SP - 446
EP - 460
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
ER -