Social influence in charitable giving.

Charities often publicize generous contributions as a fund-raising strategy to encourage individuals to donate more. This paper presents a laboratory experiment to analyze the effect of social influence in charitable giving. I conjecture that different types of social information about other donors’ decisions will have different positive effects on donations, both to increase the proportion of positive donations and the total donations contribution. In a sample of one hundred and twenty one university students, social information regarding the mode contribution and information about randomly chosen contribution suggestively increases the proportion of positive donations and total donation amount. However, neither effect is statistically significant in this experimental design