MARC Record from Library of Congress

LEADER: 02755nam a22002897a 4500
001 2009655978
003 DLC
005 20090827121114.0
007 cr |||||||||||
008 090609s2009 mau sb 000 0 eng
010 $a 2009655978
040 $aDLC$cDLC
050 00 $aHB1
100 1 $aMeer, Jonathan.
245 14 $aThe abcs of charitable solicitation$h[electronic resource] /$cJonathan Meer, Harvey S. Rosen.
260 $aCambridge, MA :$bNational Bureau of Economic Research,$cc2009.
490 1 $aNBER working paper series ;$vworking paper 15037
538 $aSystem requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
538 $aMode of access: World Wide Web.
500 $aTitle from PDF file as viewed on 6/9/2009.
530 $aAlso available in print.
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references.
520 3 $a"A substantial experimental literature suggests that a personal solicitation is an effective way to induce people to make charitable donations. We examine whether this result generalizes to a non-experimental setting. Specifically, we estimate the effect of a marginal personal solicitation using observational data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we refer to as Anon U. At Anon U, volunteers use lists provided by the Development Office to telephone classmates and solicit them for donations. The names on these lists are always in alphabetical order. The volunteers who do the soliciting often run out of time before they reach the end of their lists. These observations suggest a simple strategy for testing whether personal solicitation matters, viz., examine whether alumni with names toward the end of the alphabet are less likely to give than alumni with names toward the beginning, ceteris paribus. If so, then a marginal personal solicitation matters. Our main finding is that location in the alphabet -- and hence, a personal solicitation -- has a strong effect on probability of making a gift. A rough estimate of the elasticity of the probability of giving with respect to the probability of receiving a personal solicitation is 0.15. However, there is no statistically discernible effect on the amount given, conditional on donating. We also find that women respond more strongly to a personal solicitation than men. This is consistent with a robust result in the psychology literature, that women find it more difficult than men to refuse requests that they perceive as being legitimate"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
700 1 $aRosen, Harvey S.
710 2 $aNational Bureau of Economic Research.
830 0 $aWorking paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;$vworking paper no. 15037.
856 40 $uhttp://papers.nber.org/papers/w15037