How website information decreases intangibility and influences donation

The purpose of this article is to understand how online marketing communications influence donors. This article postulates, in the online arena, by taking the intangible and making it real, definite, solid, or easily grasped, one can positively impact donation. The data were collected in a lab where respondents from a university in the southwest United States explored a well-known nonprofit website. Following the exploration, they responded to a series of survey questions. The findings show that a well-designed website decreases perceptions of intangibility and increases donation. For inexperienced donors, the affective aspects of the site are more influential in determining donation. Our study is one of the first to focus on how specific information on a nonprofit website may influence donation with regards to intangibility. Our work was limited by the use of students and hypothetical situations. By utilizing cognitively and affectively laden website characteristics effectively, nonprofits can influence decision making and subsequent donation through organizational perceptions of intangibility.     

Euclidean preferences

This note is devoted to the question: how restrictive is the assumption that preferences be Euclidean in d dimensions. In particular it is proven that any preference profile with I individuals and A alternatives can be represented by Euclidean utilities with d   dimensions if and only if d≥min?(I,A−1)$d\ge \min ?(I\text{,}A-1)$. The paper also describes the systems of A points which allow for the representation of any profile over A alternatives, and provides similar results when only strict preferences are considered. These findings contrast with the observation that if preferences are only required to be convex then two dimensions are always sufficient.     

Donor recognition: A double-edged sword in charitable giving

Previous studies discover confounding results on how donor recognition affects individual charitable giving. To answer the questions of how different donor recognition schemes affect individual giving and what type is more effective as a marketing strategy to meet different fundraising goals, we conducted a field experiment in China with three donor recognition types: voluntary, involuntary, and mandatory donor recognition. We used social media to recognize donors and verified the field experiment results with naturally occurring data. We observed similar behavioral patterns in both samples. The results of this study explain the mixed results from previous studies, suggesting that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for recognizing donors. Decision makers of nonprofit organizations need to select the appropriate type of donor recognition based on their fundraising goals.     

Weighted distances between preferences

Individual disagreements are assumed to be reflected in the preferences. Distance functions, e.g., the well-known Kemeny (1959) metric, are used to measure these disagreements. However, a disagreement on how to rank the top two alternatives may be perceived more (or less) than a disagreement on how to rank the bottom two alternatives. We propose two conditions on functions which characterize a class of weighted semi-metric functions. This class of semi-metrics allows to quantify disagreements according to where they occur in preferences. It turns out one of these functions, “the path minimizing function”, is the only metric which generalizes the Kemeny metric.     

Threshold preferences and the environment

In this article we study the implication of thresholds in preferences. To model this we extend the basic model of John and Pecchenino (1994) by allowing the current level of environmental quality to have a discrete impact on how an agent trades off future consumption and environmental quality. Thus, we endogenize the semi-elasticity of utility based on a step function. We find that for low (high) thresholds, environmental quality converges to a low (high) steady state. For intermediate levels it converges to a stable p-cycle, with environmental quality being asymptotically bounded below and above by the low and high steady state. As policy implications we study shifts in the threshold. Costless shifts of the threshold are always worthwhile. If it is costly to change the threshold, then it is worthwhile to change the threshold if the threshold originally was sufficiently low. Lump-sum taxes lead to a development trap and a proportional income tax should be preferred.     

"捐还是不捐?" ——如何提高个体慈善捐助行为

慈善捐助行为指个体通过捐赠金钱、时间或物资等方式帮助有需要的群体或慈善组织。个人的慈善捐助行为能够促进社会资源再分配,提高社会整体福祉。因此,如何科学地对慈善活动进行宣传、吸引更多个体参与捐助,对于营销学者而言是一个十分重要的话题。一次捐助包括捐助者、捐助资源、受助者以及社会和文化四个方面,这四个方面的因素既可以单独影响消费者的慈善捐助行为,又可以相互影响对慈善捐助行为产生交互作用。由此可见,个体的慈善捐助行为是十分复杂的,将通过对这四方面因素的梳理以提高我国公益组织对个体捐助行为的理解,进而采取有效的宣传以募集更多的捐助。     

职业文化价值观与管理控制偏好关系研究

本文以组织内部的会计岗位、销售岗位、采购岗位和技术岗位为对象,研究这四种职业的文化价值观及管理控制偏好．并分析二者之间的关系。根据249份有效问卷的统计分析发现：（1）不同岗位类型对分权、正规化和业绩基础财务报酬的偏好有显著差异;不同岗位类型对预算参与和预算基础业绩评价的偏好没有显著差异;（2）不同岗位之间的权力距离指数和不确定回避指数有显著差异;不同岗位的个人主义指数和雄心指数没有显著差异;（3）个人主义和雄心对分权偏好、正规化、预算参与和预算基础业绩评价偏好没有显著影响;个人主义与业绩基础财务报酬存在显著正相关关系。上述发现告诉我们,组织内部不同职业之间的文化价值观和管理控制偏好在某些方面存在显著性差异,并且,文化价值观的差异在一定程度上会影响管理控制偏好的差异。所以,在设计管理控制系统时,要考虑这种职业差异的需求。     

Comparing preferences for employing males and nationals across countries: extending relational models and social dominance theory

We expand relational models theory by integrating it with social dominance theory to examine how national culture influences preferences for males and nationals in employment-related decisions. Data from the World Values Survey (N = 2331), culture scores from the GLOBE project (N = 62 countries), and Hofstede (N = 49 countries) indicate that collectivism is associated with an increased chance of preferences for males and nationals, gender egalitarianism is associated with a decreased chance of preferences for males, and masculinity is associated with more chances for preferences for nationals. Demographic variables (age, sex, and education) were also associated with our dependent variables after taking all the variance of the different cultural dimensions into account. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Potential games with incomplete preferences

This paper studies potential games allowing the possibility that players have incomplete preferences and empty best-response sets. We define four notions of potential games, ordinal, generalized ordinal, best-response, and generalized best-response potential games, and characterize them using cycle conditions. We study Nash equilibria of potential games and show that the set of Nash equilibria remains the same when every player’s preferences are replaced with the smallest generalized (best-response) potential relation or a completion of it. Similar results are established about strict Nash equilibria of ordinal and best-response potential games. Lastly, we examine the relations among the four notions of potential games as well as pseudo-potential games.     

Toward an understanding of thrift store donors

• An increasing number of service organizations are developing thrift stores (or, second hand stores, charity shops) to raise resources to support their mission‐directed activities. Such stores seek donated merchandize…sell it …and use the proceeds to support their service efforts. The purpose of the study is to examine the processes by which thrift store donors: (a) determine that donation of pre‐owned merchandize is desirable, (b) get information about competing donation outlets, and (c) select which organization(s) are appropriate for their particular merchandize donation. A web survey was administered to assess these processes. The results will allow organizations to critically evaluate their existing thrift store practices against donor preferences in the interest of continuous improvement.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Disentangling preferences and limited attention: Random-utility models with consideration sets

This paper presents a model of choice with limited attention. The decision-maker forms a consideration set, from which she chooses her most preferred alternative. Both preferences and consideration sets are stochastic. While we present axiomatisations for this model, our focus is on the following identification question: to what extent can an observer retrieve probabilities of preferences and consideration sets from observed choices? Our first conclusion is a negative one: if the observed data are choice probabilities, then probabilities of preferences and consideration sets cannot be retrieved from choice probabilities. We solve the identification problem by assuming that an “enriched” dataset is observed, which includes choice probabilities under two frames. Given this dataset, the model is “fully identified”, in the sense that we can recover from observed choices (i) the probabilities of preferences (to the same extent as in models with full attention) and (ii) the probabilities of consideration sets. While a number of recent papers have developed models of limited attention that are, in a similar sense, “fully identified”, they obtain this result not by using an enriched dataset but rather by making a restrictive assumption about the default option, which our paper avoids.     

The ecology of internal workplace giving at Indiana University: a case study of faculty and staff campus campaign communications and fundraising

• This collective case study examines university-specific philanthropic cultures, campus fundraising campaigns, and their impact on faculty and staff giving to the university. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, the study documents fundraising strategies through interviews and materials analysis and assesses their results through quantitative data on characteristics of donors and their philanthropic gifts. Examination of fundraising methods reveals differences between demand and supply-side communication strategies with faculty and staff members as internal stakeholders and donors. Concentrating on the campuses of Indiana University, a large, highly diverse public institution in the American Midwest, this study includes analysis of the outcomes of the fundraising process across institutions of different sizes, demographics, and philanthropic cultures. The findings underscore the importance of exploring the characteristics that influence employee donation behaviors as context for the creation and enactment of fundraising campaigns and highlight the need for future research in the area of workplace giving.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comments on “Pareto weights as wedges in two-country models” by D. Backus,C. Coleman,A. Ferriere and S. Lyon

Backus, Coleman, Ferriere and Lyon study how the formulations of preferences and shocks affect the behavior of macroeconomic and financial aggregates in a simple endowment economy with no frictions. Their exercise could be considered as a first step of a rich research program that can further our understanding of international business cycles. After discussing the fundamental propagation mechanisms in standard international business cycle models, I put their contribution in a broader context. I conclude with a summary of possible research questions to be explored in future work.     

Altruistic values,satisfaction and loyalty among first-time blood donors

This article is related to the recently initiated discussion on mechanisms of charitable giving and the lack of research on the mix of those mechanisms. On the basis of a comprehensive and interdisciplinary literature review in the area of blood donation management (1970–2010), the authors found that pure altruism, respectively altruistic values, is very often seen as the most important mechanism for giving blood the first time and, moreover, for building blood donor loyalty. This study argues that more knowledge on the mix of mechanisms in blood giving is needed. Therefore, this research examined the impact of altruistic values and the donors' satisfaction with the treatment on blood donor loyalty. Using survey data of the German Red Cross (N = 2149), the authors found that the impact of satisfaction with the treatment on blood donor loyalty is higher compared with altruistic values. Consequently and as one managerial implication, satisfaction measurement and management systems should be reflected more critically by blood donation centres in order to increase blood donations in the future. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social preferences for health states: An empirical evaluation of three measurement techniques

Health state preferences measured on the general public provide useful information in their own right as well as being necessary data for the application of many health status index models. But, how should the preferences be measured? This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation in which three measurement techniques are applied to several samples of the general public to measure the social preferences for ten different health states. The standard gamble technique by von Neumann-Morgenstern, a time trade-off technique by the author, and a category scaling method are analyzed with respect to their feasibility, reliability, validity and comparability.     

Uncertain equilibria and incomplete preferences

This paper studies the tendency for incomplete preference structures to be associated with equilibrium price indeterminacies in an Arrow–Debreu–McKenzie state-contingent setting. It is shown that the presence of a sufficiently smooth stochastic production technology is inconsistent with equilibrium price indeterminacies even if all individuals have incomplete preference structures. A particularly convenient characterization of Paretian equilibria in the presence of incomplete preferences, which allows Paretian equilibrium to be characterized using simple principles of convex optimization and (sub)differential analysis, is also developed.     

Use of donor‐specified donation splitting: a technique to understand the impact of financial management on donor trust

• Two experiments investigated donors' willingness to split their donation into a proportion that the charity could use for administration costs and a portion that could be used to deliver the charity's services. Experiment 1 found that participants in the condition given the opportunity to split their donation into an amount for administration costs and an amount for service delivery gave a significantly smaller proportion of their overall donation to administration costs, when compared with participants in another condition who were simply asked what proportion of their donation they would be happy for the organization to use for administration costs. Experiment 2 manipulated the amount of information participants (donors) received about the breakdown of a charity's administration costs but found no significant change in the amount donated to administration. Both experiments show that donors were willing to donate approximately 15% of their donation directly to charity administration costs. Results are discussed in terms of understanding how a charity's financial management might be influencing donor's trust in the charity and providing charities with a degree of certainty in the proportion of donations they can spend on administration costs.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Endowment Origin,Demographic Effects,and Individual Preferences in Contests

In modern firms the use of contests as an incentive device is ubiquitous. Nonetheless, experimental research shows that in the laboratory subjects routinely make suboptimal decisions in contests even to the extent of making negative returns. The purpose of this study is to investigate how earning the endowment, demographic differences, and individual preferences impact behavior in contests. To this end, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which subjects expend costly resources (bids) to attain an award (prize). In line with other laboratory studies of contests, our results show that subjects overbid relative to theoretical predictions and incur substantial losses as a result. Making subjects earn their initial resource endowments mitigates overbidding and thus increases efficiency. Overbidding is linked to gender, with women bidding higher than men and having lower average earnings. Other demographic information, such as religiosity, and individual preferences, such as preferences toward winning and risk, also influence behavior in contests.     

Characterizing lexicographic preferences

We characterize lexicographic preferences on product sets of finitely many coordinates. The main new axiom is a robustness property. It roughly requires this: Suppose $x$ is preferred to $y$; many of its coordinates indicate that the former is better and only a few indicate the opposite. Then the decision maker is allowed a change of mind turning one coordinate in favor of $x$ to an indifference: even if one less argument supports the preference, the fact that we started with many arguments in favor of $x$ suggests that such a small change is not enough to give rise to the opposite preference.     

The role of pay secrecy policies and employee secrecy preferences in shaping job attitudes

Although pay secrecy continues to garner attention in human resource management, little research examines how these policies impact employees. Research inconsistently links secretive pay policies to unfavourable outcomes but has yet to consider that employees may have varying attitudes toward these policies. We examine how employee preferences modify the effect that organisational pay secrecy policies have on employee attitudes in a sample of 431 employed adults. To accomplish this goal, we create measures of pay secrecy policies and pay secrecy preferences that each differentiate two facets of pay secrecy: distributive pay non‐disclosure and communication restriction. Polynomial and moderated regression analyses indicated that disparities between employee preferences and organisational pay secrecy policies can reduce job satisfaction and perceptions of informational, interpersonal, and procedural justice under certain circumstances. These results simultaneously highlight the importance of employee attitudes toward pay secrecy policies and the challenges human resource practitioners face in managing employees with diverse preferences.