Donation Amount Research Articles

Благотворительная деятельность женщин в Нижегородской губерниии в 1870-1890-е гг.

The article considers women's charitable activities in the Nizhny Novgorod region in the 1870-1890s. In the XIX century women were especially social active in the field of charity. The involvement of women in the social life of the province affected mainly upper and wealthy groups of the urban population (in the peasant group the features of traditional society were preserved for a long time). The article presents new facts (found both in archival and published sources) about the philanthropy of Nizhny Novgorod merchantry and nobility. The facts demonstrate that charitable initiatives of charity activists manifested themselves mainly in their social and cultural projects. In article all donations of women are systematized by type of assistance (assistance to the poor and the church, maintenance of almshouses, donations for the construction of hospitals and maternity hospitals, charity in the field of education, donations to orphanages, registration of wills for the needs of philanthropy). It is concluded that the largest amount of donations in monetary terms in the last third of the XIX century was ordered for the construction of new hospitals. For the first time, the article presents a detailed history of the hospital institution, created with a large donation from the merchant G.N. Ryabinina for a building of surgical department of the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Zemstvo Hospital in 1899.

Infaq and Shadaqah for Education: Prohibited Fees or Social Responsibility?

This research aims to analyze the relationship between voluntary donations (infaq) and prohibited fees in the Ministry of Education and Culture Regulation No. 44 of 2012, as well as the views of Islamic scholars regarding the position of voluntary donations as a means of financing education. The research method used is a normative approach that utilizes legal and comparative approaches. The research findings indicate that voluntary donations, also known as infaq, shadaqah, or amal jariyah, are considered a prohibited fee under the Ministry of Education and Culture Regulation No. 44 of 2012. However, in practice, these voluntary donations meet the criteria for fees as described in Article 11 of the regulation and are viewed by Islamic scholars as a form of social responsibility in the field of education. It is not permissible for these donations to be binding on the donor in terms of the amount and time of donation.
 Highlights :
 
 This research examines the connection between voluntary donations (infaq) and prohibited fees in education financing under Ministry of Education and Culture Regulation No. 44 of 2012.
 The findings show that although infaq is considered a prohibited fee, it is viewed as a form of social responsibility in education by Islamic scholars.
 It should not be binding on the donor in terms of the amount and time of donation.
 
 Keywords: infaq, shadaqah, voluntary donations, education financing, Islamic scholars.

Fifty shades of greenbeard: robust evolution of altruism based on similarity of complex phenotypes.

We study the evolution of altruistic behaviour under a model where individuals choose to cooperate by comparing a set of continuous phenotype tags. Individuals play a donation game and only donate to other individuals that are sufficiently similar to themselves in a multidimensional phenotype space. We find the generic maintenance of robust altruism when phenotypes are multidimensional. Selection for altruism is driven by the coevolution of individual strategy and phenotype; altruism levels shape the distribution of individuals in phenotype space. Low donation rates induce a phenotype distribution that renders the population vulnerable to the invasion of altruists, whereas high donation rates prime a population for cheater invasion, resulting in cyclic dynamics that maintain substantial levels of altruism. Altruism is therefore robust to invasion by cheaters in the long term in this model. Furthermore, the shape of the phenotype distribution in high phenotypic dimension allows altruists to better resist the invasion by cheaters, and as a result the amount of donation increases with increasing phenotype dimension. We also generalize previous results in the regime of weak selection to two competing strategies in continuous phenotype space, and show that success under weak selection is crucial to success under strong selection in our model. Our results support the viability of a simple similarity-based mechanism for altruism in a well-mixed population.

Will Company’s Social Donation Impact it’s Stock Performance? Evidence from China

With increasing market attention to corporate Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) practice. Corporate social donation plays an important part in a firm’s stock performance. Through regression analysis, this study aims to determine the relationship between corporate social donation surprise and a firm’s abnormal stock return in the next few periods. I analyzed 484 Chinese public companies from A and B shares and obtained the social donation amount from 2010-2020. The results show a positive and significant relationship between corporate social donation surprise and the firm’s abnormal stock return in the next two years. The analysis also indicates corporate social donation’s impact is stronger after COVID-19. For robustness checks, the study utilizes reverse causality analysis and nonlinear regression. I find that there is little possibility of a reverse impact from the company’s abnormal stock return. In addition, the result suggests the impact of corporate social donation appears to be an inverse U-shape. I also examine the different impacts on different market conditions. The findings of this study provide evidence for previous literature and guidance for proper corporate social donations.

The influence of background music and narrative setting on anthropomorphic judgements of killer whale (Orcinus orca) emotional states and subsequent donation behavior.

Animal documentary films such as Blackfish, considered nonfiction accounts of reality, nonetheless use rhetorical devices to engage viewers and shape their emotional experience for maximum effect. Such devices can also influence attitudes and alter behavior. In animal documentaries, anthropomorphic impressions of the animals by audiences are key. Using general population samples in the US, three online experiments assessed the influence of background music and narrative setting on how viewers emotionally appraised the emotional state of a killer whale (Orcinus orca) and subsequently donated to causes affiliated with killer whales. While happy music led to perceptions of a happy whale, sad music led to perceptions of a sad whale. mediation analyses showed that these perceptions indirectly influence donation behavior, via beliefs about the killer whale's welfare and wellbeing. Analyses also indicated that the highest donation amounts towards killer whales were elicited from footage depicting a killer whale in the wild, with sad background music. These findings highlight the potential power that animal and nature documentaries have over viewers, which, when combined with human tendencies toward anthropomorphism, can have significant influence on conservation attitudes and behavior.

Avoiding Peer Information and Its Effects on Charity Crowdfunding: A Field Experiment

We study the behavior of an individual avoiding peer information from a natural field experiment of charity crowdfunding. The unique experimental design enables us to employ an instrumental variable strategy to identify how the behavior influences individual giving to and promotion of charity campaigns. We find that, even with free access, 89% of individuals chose not to seek peer information. These individuals were less likely, whereas their peers were more likely to give and help promote in the past. The behavior would reduce the total distribution of campaigns by 8.5% and the total donation amount by 7.7%. A stylized model is used to illustrate how the pressure from peer comparison drives the individuals not to seek the information and how this behavior could influence giving and promoting behaviors of a group of marginal individuals. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72103110]. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4807 .

Digital economy and private donation behavior: an empirical analysis based on the CFPS data

With the development of digital economy, especially the Mobile payment, the lifestyles such as the private donation, is undergoing accelerated changes in the last decades. Based on the China Family Panel Studies 2018 data, this paper systematically investigated the donation models, empowered by digital technology, have realized economy system refinement and intelligent development. Compared with residents who do not use the Internet, residents who use the Internet are about 10% more likely to donate, and the amount of donations will increase by about 56%. After considering the potential endogeneity problem, results still hold with Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Instrumental Variable. The mechanism analysis shows that the searching cost and information asymmetry play an important role. The research of this paper has enlightening that the widespread use of digital technologies can effectively change the private donation behavior and penetrate energy consumption via dramatically decreasing searching cost.

Improved neural network for predicting blood donations based on two emergent factors.

Blood donation forecasting is a critical part of blood supply chain management. However, few studies have focused on modeling blood donation with different emergency factors. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of different emergency events on blood donation and to build a suitable blood volume prediction model. The amount of blood donation from 2015 to December 2021 at Beijing Tongzhou District Central Blood Station was selected as the time series data. First, statistical methods were employed to analyze the effect of weather and epidemic factors on blood donation. Second, a hybrid model of SARIMAX and a neural network was built to predict the blood donation in the next two weeks with two factors. We identified significant differences in blood donations under different emergency conditions and a high correlation between epidemic status and blood donations. In addition, the decision coefficient improved by 60.7%, and the Root Mean Square Error(RMSE) decreased by 1.668 when using the hybrid model of SARIMAX and the neural network, indicating that the model was effective in reducing the prediction error of blood donation. The hybrid model approach allows long-term forecasting of blood donations under emergency conditions and provides reliable and accurate forecasting results for blood stations up to 2weeks in advance, facilitating warnings on the blood supply to relevant hospitals and improving hospital treatment rates while reducing blood transportation costs.

Improving the Quality of In-Kind Donations: A Field Experiment

Problem definition: Although in-kind donations contribute to charity’s triple bottom line (i.e., generating additional revenue for the charity, contributing to social welfare, and reducing environmental waste through rechanneling used items), inappropriate material donations impose additional costs to sort, process, or discard them. Minimizing the amount of undesired in-kind donations, however, is a challenge given charities’ sensitive relationship with their donors. This paper examines the effectiveness of behavioral interventions on improving the quality of in-kind donations gifted by individuals. Methodology/results: We conducted a field experiment to implement interventions motivated by two well-established behavioral mechanisms: information disclosure and social norm. We studied the reaction of 763 donors who were scheduled to make an in-kind donation at a local charity between October 31 and November 11, 2020. Our results show that using the social norm intervention effectively improved the quality of in-kind donations, whereas information disclosure, which is commonly used in practice as the industry standard intervention, was ineffective. We also conducted two postexperiment analyses. First, we collected additional data on 1,301 in-kind donations whose donors had received the social norm intervention during February 2021. Results show that the impact of the social norm intervention is stable over different time periods. Second, we studied the spillover effect of these interventions for a period of 12 months and did not find a negative long-term impact on in-kind donations. Managerial implications: A conservative estimation shows that implementing the social norm intervention reduced the junk donations received by 50% without having a negative spillover effect on donors’ in-kind donations or imposing any direct operating cost. Consequently, this field evidence provides an effective, cost-efficient, and scalable solution for charities to address the quality problem of in-kind donations. In addition, our results challenge the industry conventional practice of incorporating information disclosure in their communications with donors. Funding: This work was supported by Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust [Grant 2020 Initiative].

Blockchain zakat in zakat management organizations, is it necessary?

Purpose — This paper aims to analyze whether zakat management organizations need a blockchain zakat system in maintaining transparency of zakat management which can have an impact on increasing the amount of donations collected from muzakki.Method — This research is a qualitative research conducted with descriptive-analytic method through literature study.Result — Zakat management organizations have a duty to ensure transparent management of the funds they collect as public institutions, and therefore must be trustworthy. By adopting a blockchain-based zakat system, these organizations can enjoy various advantages such as trustlessness, immutability, decentralization, lower costs, peer-to-peer transactions, transparency, and universal banking. This technology can also help address existing issues within zakat institutions.Contribution — This study contributes to the existing literature on blockchain-based zakat system which is still rarely to be discussed.

Enhancing Donor Agency to Improve Charitable Giving: Strategies and Heterogeneity

This research investigates whether charities can enhance fundraising effectiveness by increasing donors’ sense of agency. This article introduces two strategies that allow donors to target individual charitable projects, either via the choice options (targeting-via-options) or via the suggested donation amounts (targeting-via-amounts). A large-scale field experiment involving more than 40,000 prospective donors manipulates the ability to control the allocation of the charity's resources and finds that enhancing donor agency boosts fundraising revenue by 42%. A causal forest analysis indicates significant donor heterogeneity, with a subset of donors being three times more responsive to the opportunity to target their gift than the average donor. Inactive donors, “clumpy” donors (who exhibit uneven donation patterns), and donors who concentrate their gifts during the popular giving periods are less responsive to interventions, whereas frequent, generous, and long-tenured donors are more responsive to them. Three experiments offer stronger internal validity regarding the manipulations and process evidence that agency—and not emotion—is responsible for the increased donation effects. An optimization analysis provides implications for how charities can leverage these insights to manage their fundraising campaigns to greater success.

Voluntary or reluctant? Social influence in charitable giving: an ERP study.

Social information has substantial influences on prosocial behavior. In this study, we performed an event-related potential (ERP) experiment to examine the effect of social influence on giving. The participants were allowed to form an initial decision on how much money to donate to a charity provided the program's average donation amount and to make a second donation decision. Social influence varied in different directions (upward, downward and equal) by altering the relative donation amount between the average donation amount and the participants' first donation amount. The behavioral results showed that participants increased their donation amount in the upward condition and decreased it in the downward condition. The ERP results revealed that upward social information evoked larger feedback-related negativity (FRN) amplitudes and smaller P3 amplitudes than in the downward and equal conditions. Furthermore, the pressure ratings, rather than the happiness ratings, were associated with the FRN patterns across the three conditions. We argue that people in social situations are more likely to increase their donations owing to pressure than voluntary altruism. Our study provides the first ERP evidence that different directions of social information evoke different neural responses in time course processing.

College students’ aesthetic affection and prosocial behaviour: The role of empathy

Two studies were conducted to explore the influence of college students’ aesthetic affection on prosocial behaviour and the role of empathy. In Study 1, 343 college students completed the Chinese College Students Aesthetic Affection Questionnaire (CCSAAQ), the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI-C), and the Measure of Prosocial Tendencies (PTM-C). The results showed that students with higher aesthetic affection and trait empathy also had higher prosocial behaviour. Trait empathy partially mediated the relationship between aesthetic affection and prosocial behaviour. More specifically, aesthetic affection can directly promote prosocial behaviour and can indirectly promote prosocial behaviour through trait empathy. In Study 2, 121 students completed a behavioural “Dictator Game” experiment (two factors between-subject design) with manipulation of aesthetic affection (high group/low group) and state empathy (induction group/control group) to investigate effects on helping behaviour. The results suggested that induction state empathy and high aesthetic affection can lead to more helping behaviour (donation amount) and that state empathy can promote the helping behaviour of college students with low aesthetic affection. Based these findings, we conclude that empathy plays an important role in strengthening the relationship between aesthetic affection and prosocial behaviour.

Profiles in workplace giving: a cluster analysis of ‘types’ of givers within a public university

This study examines public employees’ donations to a workplace giving campaign at a large public university in the south-east of the United States. First, we employed logistic regression to predict the likelihood of donating through workplace giving programmes using a sample of employees at a large public university (N = 11,726). Second, we estimated an ordinary least squares regression to identify the significant predictors of donation value with a subsample of employee donors (n=1,832). Third, we developed donor profiles (for example, clusters) of employee benefactors using K-medoids clustering. Factors such as sex, age, education and salary were significant predictors of both being a donor and the donation amount. Additionally, employment duration was significantly related to being a donor and the donation amount, while job classification only predicted being a donor. Employee donors fell into five distinct clusters. These findings contribute to our knowledge of workplace giving campaigns and can be used to develop strategic marketing campaigns.

On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games When the Recipient is a Charity

In experimental dictator games, subjects typically give substantial portions of their endowment to their partner, which has been interpreted as evidence that individuals are altruistic. Two influential studies find that when the choice set is expanded to allow subjects to take money away from an anonymous partner, they no longer give money. This suggests that when partners are anonymous, the seemingly altruistic behavior observed in standard dictator games is an artifact of the limited choice set. A vast literature employs dictator games in a different important context where the recipient is not anonymous: charitable giving. In this study, we examine whether generosity vanishes upon allowing subjects to take money when dictators are partnered with a charity instead of an anonymous partner. While we replicate the result that subjects are substantially less generous when the option to take money away from an anonymous partner is added to their choice set, we find that subjects remain generous when the take options are added when the partner is a charity. Regardless of whether subjects are able to take money from the charity or not, subjects give positive amounts just as often, the mean and median donation amounts are similar, and the modal choice is to give the entire endowment to the charity. These results suggest that dictator games remain a useful tool in studies of charitable giving.

The more the better? The negative effect of disseminators' donations in online donation

AbstractOnline donation platforms often present information regarding disseminators' donations to stimulate donations, but it is unclear how it affects potential donors' behavior. This paper examines how disseminators' donation amounts impact potential donors' donation likelihood. The findings of six studies show that potential donors are less (vs. more) likely to contribute to unfamiliar initiators when disseminators contribute large (vs. small) amounts. The following psychological response drives the effect: when potential donors observe disseminators contribute more, they infer that disseminators have assumed greater responsibility and thus reduce their perceived responsibility to the unfamiliar initiator. We also confirm the boundary conditions of tie strength and empathy. This effect is significant when donors have low levels of empathy or strong ties with the disseminator. In contrast, this effect is reversed when tie strength is high and attenuated when potential donors have high levels of empathy. Our research enriches the literature concerning the effects of others' donations and online donation and provides managerial guidance to enable the success of online donation projects.

Demanding the morally demanding: Experimental evidence on the effects of moral arguments and moral demandingness on charitable giving

What are the effects of confronting people with moral arguments and morally demanding statements to perform certain actions, such as donating to charity? To investigate this question, we conduct an online randomized experiment via Prolific (n=2500) where participants can donate to charity. Using a between-subject design, we provide some participants with a moral argument as to why they should donate. We then add a single sentence on top of the moral argument that expresses and varies moral demandingness at different levels. To reduce experimenter demand worries, in a follow-up experiment (n=1200) we provide the same stimulus via an external party's website—the non-profit Giving What We Can. In both experiments, we find that moral arguments significantly increase both the frequency and amount of donations compared to the control. However, we fail to find evidence that increasing the level of moral demandingness affects donation behavior in either experiment. Exploratory equivalence tests provide evidence in favor of such a null effect. Our findings suggest that charities should employ moral arguments to increase giving, though our findings give no specific recommendation as to the moral demandingness employed as there is no additive effect of morally demanding arguments.

What Determines the Success of Charitable Crowdfunding Campaigns? Evidence from China During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The dramatic rise of charitable crowdfunding has changed the landscape of fundraising and giving. Little empirical work, however, has been done to explore critical factors that are associated with successful charitable crowdfunding campaigns run both by formal charities and non-charities. To advance the literature on donation-based charitable crowdfunding, we draw on a unique dataset of 427 COVID-19 crowdfunding campaigns in China, examining whether and how external and internal quality signals are related to crowdfunding success measured by total donation amount. Our results show that crowdfunding success is positively associated with internal signals (updates and predefined duration), whereas the role of external signals (platform and award) is less certain. While we find a positive relationship between award information and funding success, informal campaigns using an alternative medium seem to generate more donations than formal campaigns using authorized platforms. The implications of this study for theory, practice and policy are also discussed.

The role of healthcare professionals to improve organ donation and transplantation outcome: a national study.

Improve the quality of donor coordination activities caused by an increased organ donation rate. The aim of this study was to assess the influence of organ donation coordinators' characteristics on rate of donation and family consent rate in Recognition Centers (RCs) and Organ Procurement Units (OPUs) in Iran by analyzing the organ procurement and transplantation data. Based on a questionnaire, this retrospective study evaluated the number of confirmed brain deaths, family consent rate, organ recoveries, rate of expired brain death cases before and after family consent in Iran. According to results, the overall family consent rate in the entire country is equal to 60.63%. The work experience had a significant effect on the number of procured organs (P < 0.004), death rate after family consent (P < 0.04), and eligible donor death before family consent (P < 0.03). The type of unit (RCs or OPUs) had significant difference on death after family consent (P < 0.023), the death before family consent (P < 0.014), the sum of procured organ (P < 0.04). The consent rate and donor management in the cases of brain death are unacceptable. The coordinators need training to increase their efficiency in terms of family approach and maintenance of brain death. Only by improving the level of family consent and increasing the coordinators' maintenance skills for brain death cases can the amount of organ donation in Iran be doubled to the current amount.

Communicating the cost of your altruism makes you cool—competitive altruism and sexual selection in a real-life charity situation

Maintaining a good reputation is crucial for humans. Altruism, e.g. charity, may serve as a costly signal that enhances reputation based on the real or communicated cost. Fundraising via charity running triggers competitive altruism when potential donors donate in reaction to the reputation increase of the fundraiser. Using real-life data of marathonists and half-marathonists (388 runners) and their 9281 donors, the present research focuses on how the communicated cost and goal of a charity run affected the potential donors. We analysed the introductory texts of the runners presented online according to the cost and the social benefit of the fundraising communicated by them. We have shown that emphasizing more the subjective cost of running and the social benefit of the goal, or writing a longer text, attracted more donors and, even though the average amount of donation per donor did not increase, still lead to a greater amount of donations collected overall by the fundraiser. It was also shown that a higher communicated subjective cost resulted in a higher ratio of opposite-sex donors, both in the case of male and female runners, suggesting that the communication of the cost of an altruistic act might be the object of sexual selection.Significance statementA good reputation is crucial for humans, as a reputable person enjoys several benefits. One way to maintain a good reputation is to be altruistic, e.g. doing charity. A seemingly high cost and a socially accepted goal may result in a higher reputation. Using data from a charity running community we demonstrate that fundraisers who emphasize their subjective cost (how difficult to run), and emphasize the good goal of the charity, attract more donors, and even though the average amount of each donation does not increase, a higher number of donors results in a greater amount of donations collected overall. Talking about the difficulties of the charity run results in a higher ratio of opposite-sex donors. Our results may be helpful to plan more successful charity events or to make a human community more altruistic and cooperative in general.