Peer effects in charitable giving: Evidence from the (running) field

There is a widespread belief that peer effects are important in charitable giving, but surprisingly little evidence on how donors respond to their peers. We analyse a unique dataset of donations to online fundraising pages to provide evidence on the direction and magnitude of peer effects – we find that a £10 increase in the mean of past donations increases giving by £3.50, on average. We also explore potential explanations for why peers matter. We find no evidence that donations provide a signal of charity quality, nor any role for fundraising targets. Our preferred explanation is that donors benchmark themselves against the distribution of donations from their peers.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  The Centre for Market and Public Organisation

• Publication date

  2015-06-01

• Fields of study

  Law, Economics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/ECOJ.12114
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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