Donation Allocation Research Articles

When charity begins at home: How personal financial scarcity drives preference for donating locally at the expense of global concerns

Research was conducted to understand what drives individuals’ decisions to make charitable donations to local charities versus international charities that serve targets in far-away places. Six experiments using real charities were conducted: in two experiments participants donated their own money and in the other four participants dictated the allocation of money donated by the authors. Results demonstrate that when individuals perceive that their personal financial resources are scarce, their charitable allocations are weighted more heavily towards local charities. A random effects meta-analysis of effect sizes corroborates the robustness of these results. The authors discuss research on social myopia, altruism, and evolutionary psychology to explain charitable priorities, and demonstrate that financial scarcity is an activating agent that drives individuals to prioritize local charities regardless of the importance of the charity and neediness of the beneficiary. The authors further show that the individual’s implicit similarity to the target of donation further enhances the effect of personal financial scarcity. The authors present the results within the context of the broader conversation among psychologists and philosophers regarding optimal giving to achieve the greatest social good, suggesting that even a small change in donation allocation has substantial economic consequences for charities far away from home.

The interactive effect of emotional appeals and past performance of a charity on the effectiveness of charitable advertising

Past research has shown the significant role of emotional appeals in charitable advertising. Most studies in this area have examined the effects of negative emotions, but it is less clear when and how positive emotions can also be effective in encouraging donation allocations. Across two experimental studies, the present research demonstrates that the congruent matching of pride with positive past performance and compassion with negative past performance increases donation allocations. This ‘match-up’ effect emerges because pride elicits concerns for merit, whereas compassion elicits concerns for need. These findings offer important implications, both theoretically and managerially, by systematically highlighting how different, discrete positive emotions – pride and compassion – can be beneficial in charitable advertising, depending on the message highlighting the past performance of a charity.

Combinatorial Hodge theory for equitable kidney paired donation

Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) is a system whereby incompatible patient-donor pairs (PD pairs) are entered into a pool to find compatible cyclic kidney exchanges where each pair gives and receives a kidney. The donation allocation decision problem for a KPD pool has traditionally been viewed within an economic theory and integer-programming framework. While previous allocation schema work well to donate the maximum number of kidneys at a specific time, certain subgroups of patients are rarely matched in such an exchange. Consequently, these methods lead to systematic inequity in the exchange, where many patients are rejected a kidney repeatedly. Our goal is to investigate inequity within the distribution of kidney allocation among patients, and to present an algorithm which minimizes allocation disparities. The method presented is inspired by cohomology and describes the cyclic structure in a kidney exchange efficiently; this structure is then used to search for an equitable kidney allocation. Another key result of our approach is a score function defined on PD pairs which measures cycle disparity within a KPD pool; i.e., this function measures the relative chance for each PD pair to take part in the kidney exchange if cycles are chosen uniformly. Specifically, we show that PD pairs with underdemanded donors or highly sensitized patients have lower scores than typical PD pairs. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that PD pair score and the chance to obtain a kidney are positively correlated when allocation is done by utility-optimal integer programming methods. In contrast, the chance to obtain a kidney through our method is independent of score, and thus unbiased in this regard.

Comparative Analysis of Earthquake Management in Pohang and Japan

This study aims to create_a disaster management system after an earthquake. Japan's earthquake disaster management system, including the Disaster Countermeasures Basic Act, addresses all of the disaster phases of prevention, mitigation, preparedness and emergency response as well as recovery and reconstruction with roles and responsibilities among the national and local governments clearly defined. Korea's earthquake disaster management system are including the Disaster Countermeasures Basic, but when the 9.12 earthquake occurred, problems such as insufficient early response, study on the earthquake lack were revealed. This study conducted a field survey and analyzed coping process after Po Hang earthquake. Therefore, this study have found that Disaster Management Headquarters are operated rapidly. They are coped with urgent safety inspection for damage facilities and soil liquefaction with advanced equipment. And The headquarters interviewed with victims. So they found out What the victims needed. However, when carrying out relief activities, Research of temporary housing and allocation of donations was not rapid. Further, this study have found that earthquake specialists were lack and disaster information transfer was not working. This study will be utilized as fundamental data in planning disaster management system after an earthquake.

Resource deployment and donation allocation for epidemic outbreaks

Non-profit organizations play a central role in responding to the devastating consequences of epidemic outbreaks in developing economies. We propose an epidemic response model in resource-limited countries that determines the number, size, and location of treatment facilities, deploys critical medical staff, locates ambulances to triage points, and organizes the transportation of severely ill patients to treatment facilities. The model is based on the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti and is general enough to be used for similar epidemic outbreaks. The model enables not-for-profit decision-makers to assess health care triage capabilities, transportation needs, and requirements for medical personnel staffing and deployment. We propose an algorithmic procedure using hierarchical constraints and valid inequalities that reduce the solution time by one order of magnitude. Additionally, we propose a framework that can be used to optimally allocate a donation, to determine a list of priorities for earmarked donations, and to perform a cost-benefit analysis of an intervention strategy financed by a donation. The model is formulated as a large integer problem with many symmetries. An extended analysis based on the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti provides insights about: the criticality of the resources, the implementation of a balanced response strategy, the optimal allocation of resources in terms of the severity of the attack rate, and the benefits of the proposed response approach with respect to other intervention strategies.

Should Charity Begin at Home? An Empirical Investigation of Consumers’ Responses to Companies’ Varying Geographic Allocations of Donation Budgets

In our globalized and interconnected world, companies are increasingly donating substantial amounts to good causes around the globe. Many companies choose to donate “at home” while others give to causes in far-away places where recipients are in dire need of support. Interestingly, past research on corporate donations has neglected the question of whether consumers differentially reward companies for geographically varying allocations of donation budgets. Through a mixed-methods approach, this paper remedies this gap by developing and empirically testing a conceptual framework of consumers’ preferences for geographically varying allocations of corporate donation budgets. In a first step, two preliminary field studies (N1=76; N2=80) involving real donations explored customers’ preferences for donation allocations varying in geographical focus. A qualitative focus-group study then investigated underlying rationales to inform the research and led to the development of hypotheses. Subsequently a large-scale between-subjects scenario experiment (N=5,770) tested the predictions. Overall, results indicate that, in contrast with current managerial practice, customers prefer companies that split donations equally between domestic and foreign recipients or even donate only abroad.

The impacts of racial group membership on people’s distributive justice

How individuals and societies distribute benefits has long been studied by psychologists and sociologists. Previous work has highlighted the importance of social identity on people's justice concerns. However, it is not entirely clear how racial in-group/out-group relationship affects the brain activity in distributive justice. In this study, event-related potentials were recorded while participants made their decisions about donation allocation. Behavioral results showed that racial in-group factor affected participants' decisions on justice consideration. Participants were more likely to make relatively equity decisions when racial in-group factor was congruent with equity compared with the corresponding incongruent condition. Moreover, this incongruent condition took longer response times than congruent condition. Meanwhile, less equity decisions were made when efficiency was larger in the opposite side to equity than it was equal between the two options. Scalp event-related potential analyses revealed that greater P300 and late positive potential amplitudes were elicited by the incongruent condition compared with the congruent condition. These findings suggest that the decision-making of distributive justice could be modulated by racial group membership, and greater attentional resources or cognitive efforts are required when racial in-group factor and equity conflict with each other.

Do Contexts Matter for Willingness to Donate to Natural Disaster Relief? An Application of the Factorial Survey

Research on charitable giving mostly investigates the effects of various donor characteristics on willingness to donate. Analyzing intentions of charitable giving to natural disaster relief, the first aim of this article is to show how situational characteristics of the recipients—that is, country contexts and disaster specificities—matter. Theoretical propositions for the effects of recipient contexts and donor attributes are derived from basic mechanisms of prosocial behavior that appear recurrently in the interdisciplinary literature. A factorial survey is used to investigate the impact of context variations. Introducing this method to the study of charitable giving is our second objective. Multilevel analyses based on a sample of 430 German students show that the effective allocation of donations and a devastating catastrophe in a needy country such as Bangladesh yield the highest contributions. In addition, the national in-group is treated favorably. Among donor characteristics, prosocial values and empathy are relevant.

National Organ Allocation Policy: The Final Rule

The DHHS Final Rule on donation allocation has established a national resource policy and network for organ donation and transplantation. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association.

Corporate Support for Artistic and Cultural Activities: What Determines the Distribution of Corporate Giving?

This paper examines the allocation of corporate donations among variouscategories of recipients and the reasons underlying that allocation. Ananalytical model is utilized to determine the importance of profitability,firm size, advertising expenditures and type of business in determining thelevel of support for each activity. The results demonstrate that corporategiving to artistic/cultural activities is correlated with advertisingexpenditures, while donations to educational, civic and health causes are not.Thus, support for culture and the arts is a means of directly promoting thefirm, while giving to other causes fulfills the firm's goals throughalternative means.

Rival charities

The paper develops a model in which a number of charities (or other nonprofit firms) provide various bundles of public goods or services through private donations. The motivation for individuals to found and operate such firms is that it allows them to influence the mix of public goods. It is their decisions regarding the allocation of donations across uses that matter in the end. Donors to these firms take into account the allocation decisions that will be made by the organizations to which they contribute. We find a propensity for such organizations to specialize in the provision of services, and further find that diversification by such firms diminishes the equilibrium level of contributions they will collect. We demonstrate the possibility that a commitment by a monopoly charity to an allocation rule that is, ex-post, privately sub-optimal can eliminate this effect, and may therefore be advantageous, ex-ante. The allocation rule which accomplishes this involves honouring donor designations of their contributions to specific uses. This is a policy that is frequently adopted by local chapters of the United Way.