The Impact of Public Scrutiny on Corporate Philanthropy

This paper proposes that a corporation’s vulnerability to public scrutiny drives its corporate giving. The hypothesis that companies donate for strategic motives is tested against the alternative that they do so for altruistic reasons. Court cases and news articles were selected as proxies for public scrutiny. Macroeconomic variables were used to gauge the level of public charitable need and test for altruism. Through examining the philanthropic behavior of 40 Fortune 500 companies over 7 years, this paper finds that companies are strategic and altruistic in their giving.Ailian Gan is a graduate of Duke University. She is an Associate at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The views expressed in this paper are the author's own and not those of the Authority.     

Altruism,Warm Glow and the Willingness-to-Donate for Green Electricity: An Artefactual Field Experiment

The ongoing liberalization of electricity markets in most western countries forms the background of our artefactual field experiment. Using a Cheap talk design [R.G. Cummings and L.O. Taylor. American Economic Review 89 (1999) 649–665] with supplementary monetary incentives, we test for presence of “warm glow” motivations [J. Andreoni. Journal of Political Economy 97 (1989) 1447–1458; Economic Journal 100 (1990) 464–477] in the willingness-to-donate for electricity generated from renewables. Our data from 200 participants supports impure altruism, that is, individuals benefit from both contributing to environmental quality and its current level when opting in favor of green electricity. Furthermore, we find evidence of crowding-out as well as crowding-in effects. Depending on the knowledge of people about electricity markets and the types of electricity contracts offered, “all-or-none” contracts are most likely to bring about crowding-out effects.     

Building corporate associations: Consumer attributions for corporate socially responsible programs

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often used as a key criterion in gauging corporate reputation. This research examined the influence of consumers’ attributions on corporate outcomes in response to CSR. Researchers and managers have considered consumers’ beliefs about CSR initiatives to be simplistic, serving either economic ends or reflecting sincere social concerns. The results of two studies established that consumers’ attributions were more complex than traditionally viewed, mirroring many of the motives ascribed to companies by managers and researchers. Rather than viewing corporate efforts along a self- or other-centered continuum, consumers differentiated four types of motives: self-centered motives that are strategic and egoistic and other-centered motives that are values driven and stakeholder driven. Consumers responded most positively to CSR efforts they judged as values driven and strategic while responding negatively to efforts perceived as stakeholder driven or egoistic. Attributions were shown to affect purchase intent as well as mediate the structure of an offer. Pam Scholder Ellen (pellen@gsu.edu) is an associate professor of marketing at the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on perceptual biases in the way consumers respond to marketplace offers, particularly in the public policy arena. In addition to theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, her research has been published in theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Public Policy & Marketing, theJournal of Consumer Affairs, and theJournal of Retailing. Deborah J. Webb (dwebb@westga.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Richards College of Business at the University of West Georgia. Her research interests include consumers’ responses to prosocial corporate behaviors, marketing and society issues, and donation behavior. Her research has been published in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Public Policy & Marketing, theJournal of Consumer Affairs, andMarketing Education Review, among others. Lois A. Mohr is a retired associate professor of marketing from the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. Her research interests focus on consumer responses to corporate social responsibility and services marketing. She has published in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal ofBusiness Research, the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, theJournal of Consumer Affairs, and theJournal of Services Marketing.     

How close to home does charity begin?

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a field experiment to analyse the extent to which people are more inclined to support a charity focused on people or causes in their own region, compared to regions in other parts of the country. New Zealand landowners were incentivized to take part in an online survey by being told they could choose a charity from a list of four that would receive a $10 donation if they completed the survey. Importantly, the charities are based in different regions of the country. We find evidence of a significant declining radius of altruism: not only do people prefer to support charities in their own area, the further away a charity is located, the less likely people are to support it. These findings highlight the importance of geographic distance (independent of social distance) in charitable giving.     

FAVOURING FRIENDS

This paper focuses on the friendship effect on donations in a dictator game. Our results indicate that the taste for altruism is substantially increased when friends play the role of recipients. Controlling for reciprocity there is still a significant friendship effect on donations.     

Accounting for the Changing Role of Family Income in Determining College Entry

In this paper, I analyze the determinants of college enrolment and the changes in these determinants over time. I propose a quantitative life‐cycle model with college enrolment. Altruistic parents provide financial support to their children. Using counterfactual experiments, I find that 24 percent of all households are financially constrained in their college decision. Constraints become more severe over time. I show that my model is consistent with a narrow college enrolment gap between students from rich and poor families, as previously reported in the empirical literature. The estimation of enrolment gaps is a popular reduced‐form approach for measuring the fraction of constrained households. My results suggest that these reduced‐form estimates are misleading, and that a structural model of parental transfers is needed to correctly identify constrained households. Further, I show that parental transfers are an important driver behind the changing role of family income as a determinant of college entry, a fact that is well documented for the US economy.     

Family ownership,altruism and agency costs in Australian small- and medium-sized enterprises

Given the continuing uncertainty about whether family firms enjoy lower agency costs, this article hypothesizes that a combination of the effects of family ownership, altruism and self-control is instead at play. To begin with, family ownership can indeed reduce agency costs through better aligning the interests of owners and managers. This is a ‘determining’ effect in that it independently mitigates one source of agency problems. However, altruism combined with self-control problems arising from the highly concentrated ownership often found in family firms can also increase agency costs. This is an ‘embedding’ effect as it is rooted in the personal relationships within the family firm. Using the Business Longitudinal Database compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we find that for larger SMEs (those with 20–200 employees), the gains in lower agency costs arising from family ownership are almost completely offset by the losses from altruism and the lack of self-control.     

Sibling donation games: pure-altruism,strategic-altruism,and the interaction of familial and public transfers

Accompanying the rapidly aging populations of high-income countries are increasing transfers of time and money from adult children to elderly parents (ascending altruism). In this paper we first develop a theoretical model to characterize the general reaction-functions of two adult siblings choosing transfer amounts (possibly time) to their needy parents under two alternative motivations: pure altruism and strategic altruism. We show that transfers are strategic substitutes under pure altruism and strategic complements under strategic altruism. The Nash-equilibrium generates distinct predictions associated with each motivation and we then explore some implications of our findings. A result with potentially important policy implications is that the response of children transfers to increased pension payments to the parents depends on the children's motivations. This contrasts with much of the literature which assumes transfers decrease with increased pension payments.     

公平、公开、激励与利他行为——基于独裁者实验的分析

标准的独裁者实验中的支出额可以测量利他行为,本文通过设计独裁者实验的不同条件,考察利他行为的可持续性以及初始所得的公平性、信息的公开性和支出配套的激励因素对利他行为的影响.实验结果显示,个体初始所得的公平性对利他捐赠的影响不确定,公开信息和给予支出配套的激励会提高捐赠水平,并对初始所得处于均值以上的优势不平等者有良好的正向捐赠激励,但对初始所得处于均值以下的劣势不平等者有反向作用.     

Altruism: primary motivation of remittances

This article examines primary incentives of remittances. After controlling for host country’s GNI per capita, real exchange rates and real interest rates, a rise in home country’s GNI per capita leads to fewer remittances. A rise in host country’s GNI per capita motivates migrants to remit more. Real interest rates have no effect on remittances. These results indicate primary incentive of remittances is altruism.