Ineffective Altruism: Giving Less When Donations Do More

Ideally, donors would allocate more resources to cost effective charities. However, informing people of the cost of, say, one meal, encourages them to fund exactly one meal. Thus, when the meal costs less, people donate less. Framing the same information in terms of meals per dollar mitigates this bias.



Citation:

Joshua Lewis and Deborah Small (2018) ,"Ineffective Altruism: Giving Less When Donations Do More", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 46, eds. Andrew Gershoff, Robert Kozinets, and Tiffany White, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 194-198.

Authors

Joshua Lewis, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Deborah Small, University of Pennsylvania, USA



Volume

NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 46 | 2018



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