Charitable Giving & Donors: Charities’ Financial Efficiency v. Social Image

Luigi Butera (George Mason, Interdiscplinary Center for Economic Science) and Jeffrey Ryan Horn (George Mason, Economics Department) have posted “Good News, Bad News and Social Image:  The Market for Charitable Giving” to SSRN.  Here is an abstract:

Financial efficiency represents a desirable quality in charitable organizations. Yet, different theories of intrinsic and extrinsic preferences for charitable giving offer opposite predictions about donors’ reaction to this information. On one hand, learning that one’s charity is better than expected directly increases the marginal impact of giving, making donations non-decreasing in the quality of news. This behavior is consistent with warm-glow theory. On the other hand, higher efficiency has an indirect negative effect on giving, since now less money is needed to produce one unit of effective charitable good. Most notably, theories of pure altruism and guilt aversion predict this behavior. A similar tension arises for prestige motivated donors whenever information provides extrinsic incentives to give (e.g. information has a social signaling value). We model this simple framework and test it using a laboratory experiment. We show that when information about efficiency is private, giving is always non-decreasing in the quality of news. However, when the efficiency of donor’ charities is public information, this relationship breaks down: 34% of donors who respond to new information do so by reducing their giving when charities are better-than expected, and increasing it when are worse. We show that this result is driven by image-motivated donors, who treat the size of their gift and the efficiency of their chosen charities as substitutes in terms of social image payoffs.