Although the link between violent video games and aggressive behavior has received extensive coverage, there is growing evidence that prosocial video games can exert a positive influence as well. However, whether these effects generalize to costlier prosocial behaviors that help more distant recipients remains unclear. Here I propose an experimental study to examine whether prosocial video games can influence charitable donation behavior. College students will be randomly assigned to play 45 min of either a prosocial video game (Lemmings) or neutral video game (Tetris), followed by a 10 min filler task (mental calculation). Participants will then be asked to complete a payment form, indicating if they want to donate a portion of their experimental participation payment to a local nonprofit organization. Based on previous research, we predict that there will be a main effect of gender, with female participants more likely to donate than males. Additionally, we hypothesize a main effect of video game, where participants who play the prosocial video game will be likelier to donate than those who play the neutral game. If confirmed, these results would extend the existing literature on prosocial video games beyond informal face-to-face helping behaviors, potentially providing a psychological mechanism for costlier needs such as charitable appeals.

The nonprofit sector is becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy both as an employer and service provider. Although most of the sector’s revenues are earned, the ability of the nonprofit sector to generate significant levels of unearned income in the form of grants and contributions reinforces the sector’s uniqueness. This dissertation uses the NCCS-Guidestar data to address questions pertaining to the determinants of nonprofits’ contributions and government grants. Each of the essays’ findings is discussed briefly below. The first chapter examines the relationship between an organization’s finances and the level of government grants received. Because organizations choose to apply for government grants, a Heckman procedure is coupled with fixed effects to produce unbiased, within organization estimates. When controlling for the probability an organization receives grant funding, the average level of grants an organization receives generally increases with improvements in efficiency measures. In testing Brooks’ (2004) adjusted performance measure, the author finds that for many categories of nonprofit organizations, improvements in performance relative to community expectations increase grants for recipients, but better performance reduces the probability an organization receives any government grants. The second essay examines the determinants of direct support to organizations in four of the major categories, namely Arts, Education, Health, and Human Services, using instrumental and panel techniques. Unlike government grants, changes in price do not affect organizations’ expected contributions. When significant, government grants generally crowd out private donations while the effects of program service revenue vary by category and specification. The final essay examines the effects of nonprofit expenses and revenues on direct support for organizations in four small subcategories, Disaster Preparedness, International Aid, Environmental Conservation, and Performing Arts. The essay tests whether the impact of various revenue and expense variables on direct support changes around an unexpected event such as 9/11. Results suggest that the events of 9/11 had a greater moderating effect for categories losing funding compared to categories that received a windfall of contributions.

This thesis explores some theoretical and empirical issues in the voluntary contributions to public good. Chapter I contains a brief motivation and introduction. In chapters II and III, we analyze two non-cooperative methods for either enhancing or mitigating externality-causing activities. Chapter II deals with positive externality in the public good contribution context, and chapter III with negative externality in the pollution abatement context. Chapter IV contains an empirical analysis of charitable donations by the elderly. Chapter II models the so-called ``corporate challenge gift'' used in real world fund-raising, and adopts the concept to voluntary contributions to public goods more generally. We model the process as a sequential game in public good contributions. One of the agents sets a quantity-contingent matching scheme to leverage higher contributions from the other players. Under the assumption that the preferences of agents are public information and the assumption that the scheme setter can commit to the matching plan, we show that the scheme brings efficient levels of total contributions to the public good. Chapter III applies some ideas from a joint work with Professor Robin Boadway and Professor Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Tremblay on ``Commitment and Matching Contributions to Public Goods'' to the issue of reducing negative externality-causing activity. In particular, it adapts both the Guttman-Danziger-Schnytzer type of rate-matching mechanism and the quantity-contingent matching method for public good contributions to the international pollution abatement problem. In a simple two-country model, we find that both matching schemes induce the countries to internalize the negative externality imposed on the other country. However, perhaps due to the lack of enough policy instruments, they cannot equate the marginal costs of abatement across the countries, leaving room for Pareto improvement. This further improvement can be achieved if the two countries also contribute to a conventional public~good. Chapter IV is an empirical exercise on some positive externality-generating activities by the elderly. It attempts to document the charitable giving of money and time by people aged 60 or above in the 2003 PSID data for the United States and analyze the influences of some economic and demographic factors on these activities. Income, wealth, the subjective rating of health status, and years in school are found to have statistically significant impacts. Income and wealth appear to have distinct influences. The tax price of money donation also has a statistically significant effect on money donations. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2007-11-19 01:48:10.777

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / How is charitable giving influenced by other donors’ charitable giving? Do people give more in the presence of other donors who are similar to themselves? Most research suggests that individuals are positively influenced by others who are similar across a variety of behaviors. In the charitable giving contexts, people are more likely to donate (or donate more) to the same cause if others who are similar donate. Yet, prior research has paid little attention to potential non-linear effects of similarity on charitable giving. Is there a certain amount of similarity that is too much? My dissertation investigates this research question through two different methodological approaches, a systematic literature review and an experimental study. The findings suggest the curvilinear effects of similarity on charitable giving (i.e. self-other oversimilarity hypothesis); that is, individuals are more likely to donate (and donate more) in the presence of other generous donors who are moderately similar to themselves. Yet, individuals are less likely to donate (and donate) less in the presence of other generous donors who are in high similarity to themselves. In other words, too much similarity between donors may actually backfire in charitable giving contexts when others give generously. This dissertation consists of a brief overview of similarity (Chapter 1), a systematic literature review (Chapter 2), an experimental study (Chapter 3) and a research proposal (Chapter 4). Chapter 1 in this dissertation identifies the importance of similarity in social relationships. Chapter 2 investigates the effects of similarity on charitable giving and identifies the literature gap. Chapter 3 attempts to fill the gap via developing and testing self-other oversimilarity hypothesis. It further offers practical implications for nonprofit fundraising practices on how to apply similarity between donors to motivate more funding. In order to provide additional empirical evidence that may contribute to theory and practice, and to address certain limitations of the current experimental study, Chapter 4 proposes a new research project to further test self-other oversimilarity hypothesis in the presence of a stingy donor.

The research applied multi-criteria decision-making analysis to donor decisions regarding the choice of a particular charity in order to identify which donor attitudes are significant in the giving decision. Factors affecting the appeal of major charities in Health and Disability were compared. The giving decision has not been widely researched overseas and particularly in New Zealand there is a need to do this in order to better manage Not-for-profit marketing resources. 24 factors associated with giving decisions were identified and quantified giving rise to a fully-specified giving model and potentially direct benefits to charitable organizations. The research has made a contribution to our understanding of donor choice determinants and giving models.

The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the impact of moral emotions (sympathy and empathy) and religious education on individual behavior. This dissertation is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter examines the effect of sympathy and empathy on tax compliance. We run a series of experiments in which we employ methods such as priming, the Davis Empathic Concern scale, and questions about frequency of prosocial behaviors in the past year in order to promote and to identify empathy and sympathy in subjects. We observe the subjects’ decisions in a series of one-shot tax compliance game presented at once and with no immediate feedback. Our results suggest that the presence and/or the promotion of sympathy in most cases encourage tax compliance. The second chapter takes into consideration religious schooling as a way of helping the development of religiosity or morality on individuals. Our intent is to investigate the effect of religious education on charitable donations in adulthood. Our empirical analysis is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics dataset. Our estimation results indicate that there is a positive effect of religious education on donations to secular and religious organizations. The third chapter explores the hypothesis that sympathetic individuals are more likely to support income redistribution because they believe that the poor may benefit from this policy. We use data from the General Social Survey to estimate support for income distribution. Our results suggest that some measures of sympathy have a positive effect on support for redistribution. Across all three main chapters, we find that sympathy has mostly small and positive effects on the types of behavior examined in this dissertation, although we are not able to determine the impact of religious education on charitable donations. Despite the sometimes weak results of this research caused by the limitations of the available data and the complexity of the issues studied, we believe that the development of these moral emotions is likely to generate benefits to society.

The research applied multi-criteria decision-making analysis to donor decisions regarding the choice of a particular charity in order to identify which donor attitudes are significant in the giving decision. Factors affecting the appeal of major charities in Health and Disability were compared. The giving decision has not been widely researched overseas and particularly in New Zealand there is a need to do this in order to better manage Not-for-profit marketing resources. 24 factors associated with giving decisions were identified and quantified giving rise to a fully-specified giving model and potentially direct benefits to charitable organizations. The research has made a contribution to our understanding of donor choice determinants and giving models.

This thesis looks at the economics of mass media from a variety of perspectives. The main aim is to analyse the key factors that influence media reporting behaviour, and in turn the impact of reportage on individual decision-making processes. The first chapter provides a brief summary of the contextual background of this thesis, by presenting the main points tackled in the subsequent chapters as well as a concise overview of the main contributions across various fields of study. The second chapter explores the relationship between advertisers and the media using a simple model of horizontal and vertical product differentiation in a duopolistic setting. In this framework, when a news story is published one firm will benefit in terms of higher consumer demand and profits, while the other will suffer. Firms can influence the media's decision to publish the news story or withhold it via advertising expenditure. The main result shows that in equilibrium when news signals conform to people's prior beliefs, extreme or strong stories will be withheld from publication by the media. This is because strong stories will result in a drastic decline in profits for one firm, thus providing it with an incentive to switch over and change its production process to mimic the other (beneficiary) firm, thereby eliminating vertical product differentiation. Therefore, the beneficiary firm would have an incentive to ensure that the news story is withheld to prevent this increase in competition and the subsequent erosion of its profit margins. The results provide an alternative rationale to explain recent evidence on under-reporting by the U.S. media in relation to various issues like climate change and the nutritional content of food. The third chapter looks at the responsiveness of individual private behaviour to media coverage of a particular news story. Survey data on charitable gift-giving in the U.S. are used in order to analyse the impact of newspaper coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on both the likelihood and magnitude of monetary disbursements towards the relief effort. The identification strategy employed in this paper exploits differences in county-level growth rates of violent crime in order to account for the variation in newspaper coverage of the tsunami, thus circumventing potential endogeneity problems. The results show that media coverage only had a modest effect on people's decision to donate or not, but conversely had a significant and non-trivial impact on the amount of money donated. Furthermore, this impact was larger for young adults within the 25-34 age bracket and individuals who had undertaken some form of voluntary work in the previous year. These results hold even after the implementation of various robustness tests, and serve to highlight the growing influence of the media on people's behaviour. The final chapter analyses the impact of media reports on electoral outcomes, and in particular the extent to which soft or sensationalist news reportage influences voting. Survey data on individual voting behaviour during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election is used, together with a novel dataset on the amount of coverage afforded to the Monica Lewinsky scandal over the period January 17, 1998 to August 31, 2000. We first show that Lewinsky coverage was not driven by the newspapers' political bias, but rather by other factors including tabloid journalism. This independence enables us to focus solely on the impact of media reports on voting, in contrast to the rest of the literature which deals with the electoral influence of politically-biased media outlets. We then look at how newspaper coverage of the Lewinsky scandal influenced voting patterns in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. To account for potential endogeneity issues we use county-level variation in the number of deaths caused by extreme weather events as an instrument for Lewinsky articles. We find that media coverage of the scandal had a positive and statistically significant impact on the likelihood of voting for George W. Bush, and conversely a negative influence on the probability of voting for Al Gore: this pattern is visible among both Democrats and Republicans. The results are robust to various tests, and raise several questions regarding the media's role within the democratic process.

Previous research has found that family socialization influences financial giving behaviors and that financial giving predicts personal wellbeing. However, little research since the early 1980s has explored this phenomenon, and virtually none of the research has been qualitative in nature. As part of the Whats and Hows of Family Financial $ocialization project, this study employs a diverse, multi-site, multigenerational sample (N = 115) to qualitatively explore the following research question: how do children learn about financial giving from their parents? In other words, how is financial giving transmitted across generations? From interviews of emerging adults and their parents and grandparents, three core themes emerged: "Charitable Donations," "Acts of Kindness," and "Investments in Family." Various topics, processes, methods, and meanings involved in this socialization are presented, along with implications and potential directions for future research.