Signaling Virtue: Charitable Behavior Under Consumer Elective Pricing
Minah H. Jung, Leif D. Nelson, Uri Gneezy, Ayelet Gneezy
Marketing Science · 2017 · Volume 36 · Issue 2
Abstract
Two field experiments examined generosity under consumer elective pricing. In shared social responsibility (SSR), consumers choose how much to pay, knowing that a percentage of their payment goes to support a charitable cause. Replicating past research, consumers in our experiments were sensitive to the presence of charitable giving, paying more when a portion of their payment went to charity. Notably, however, they were largely insensitive to the percentage of payment allocated to charity—customers paid little more when 99% of the payment went to charity than when only 1% went to charity. Neither self-selection nor social pressure fully explained higher payments under SSR. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2016.1018 .
Keywords
charitable giving, consumer elective pricing, pay what you want, scope insensitivity
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