Framing in multiple public goods games and donation to charities

Abstract

The vast amount of research devoted to public goods games has shown that contributions may be dramatically affected by varying framing conditions. This is particularly relevant in the context of donations to charities and non-governmental organizations. Here, we design a multiple public goods experiment by introducing five types of funds, each differing in the fraction of the contribution that is donated to a charity. We found that people contribute more to public goods when the associated social donations are presented as indirect rather than as direct donations. At the same time, the fraction of the donations devoted to charity is not affected by the framing. We have also found that, on average, women contribute to public goods and donate to charity significantly more than men. These findings are of potential interest to the design of social investment tools, in particular for charities to ask for better institutional designs from policy makers. ; This work was partially supported by MINECO (Spain) and FEDER funds through grant no. FIS2017-87519-P (Y.M.) and FJCI-2016-28276 (A.A.); by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades/FEDER (Spain/UE) through grant no. PGC2018-098186-B-I00 (BASIC) (A.S. and J.C.); by Comunidad de Madrid under grant no. PRACTICO-CM and by Comunidad de Madrid/Universidad Carlos III de Madrid under grant no. CAVTIONS-CM-UC3M (A.S.); by Comunidad de Aragón (Spain) through grant no. E36-20R to FENOL (C.G.L. and Y.M.); by the EU through FET-Proactive Project MULTIPLEX (contract no. 317532, Y.M.) and FET-Proactive Project DOLFINS (contract no. 640772, C.G.L., Y.M. and A.S.), and by the Spanish State Research Agency and FEDER funds, through the María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711, S.M.) and under the PACSS grant no. (RTI2018-093732-B-C22, S.M.).