Fong, Christina M.; Oberholzer-Gee, Felix, (2011). Truth In Giving: Experimental Evidence On The Welfare Effects Of Informed Giving To The Poor. Journal Of Public Economics, 95, 5-6, 436–444.

Keywords: Philanthropy, experiments, information, self-serving motivations

Discipline:

Type of evidence:

Related tools: Info on recipients' deservingness

Related theories:

Related critiques:

Charity target:

Donor population:

“Fong, C., Oberholzer-Gee, F., Truth in giving: Experimental evidence on the welfare effects of informed giving to the poor, J. Public Econ. (2010)

• dictators from the university community [Carnegie-Mellon]
• Real-life welfare recipients living in 178 public housing in Pittsburgh
• Choice treatment: Can choose to pay $1 to learn about subject’s drug/disability
• Exogenous: this information is provided freely. (Also tested with comparable $9 endowment)

”“both types of recipients are worse off when dictators can choose to learn”“ … [but] dictators are weakly better off by construction

. . .

”“In the endogenous information treatment, we not only ask dictators how much they want to give to a poor person, we also encourage them to think about why the recipients are poor, possibly highlighting reasons not to give”“

. . .

”“a third of subjects are willing to sacrifice resources to obtain additional information”“

• But it's not a fair comparison: those who decide not to buy information appear less generous than the average

Eyeballing their results on exogenous information (e.g., regression table 4)

• It increases transfers to the disabled by about $1-$3 (statistically significant) but decreases transfers to drug-abusers a small amount (insignificant)
  • Seems to increase transfers on average

”

Meta-analysis data

This paper has been added by David Reinstein