Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving.” The Quarterly

Every year, 90 percent of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessar-ily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, e.g., due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, e.g., due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their door-knobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9 to 25 percent and, if the flyer allows checking a ‘Do Not Disturb ’ box, reduces giving by 28 to 42 percent. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $356 for an in-state charity and $137 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest tha