Essays On Fundraising And Crowd Out Of Charitable Contributions

This dissertation has two components: social media fundraising and e-commerce. The first component of social media fundraising discusses social media users' charitable content generation in essay 1 and charitable giving in essay 2. In essay 1, we examine how reciprocity of followees affects social influence on users' charitable content generation. We find that within a specific charitable topic, reciprocal relationship has a positive impact on social influence, and non-reciprocal relationship has a negative impact on social influence that drives content generation following the topic. In essay 2, we investigate how individual donation decisions are influenced by reputation incentive design, peer effects, and popularity effects. We find that despite the platform designer's desire to improve fundraising performance, higher visibility of donors' contributions may have negative impact on fundraising. Peer effects are found to be positive and, hence, provide a potential solution to the free-rider problem. It is also observed that while most users crowd to popular projects, a group of users who exhibit leadership features crowd out from popular projects. E-commerce is the second component, and it also includes two essays. In essay 3, we use a game-theoretical model to understand how membership free shipping (MFS) differs from contingent free shipping (CFS). We find that in a duopoly competition, sellers' choice between CFS and MFS resembles a prisoner's dilemma. While they will both earn a higher profit when they both choose MFS, one seller may have an incentive to deviate from cooperation. In essay 4, we examined the role of live chatting tools in online marketplaces. We find that live chat can work as a substitution for reputation.

In 2015, individual donations were at a $264.58 billion high, accounting for about 72% of overall donations. The proportion of individual donations coming from crowdfunding has had a steep, increasing pattern. In 2015, for instance, $34 billion of the individual donation came from crowdfunding sources, which has nearly doubled since 2014. This share was at about $5 billion in 2013 (Forbes 2015; www.GivingUSA.org 2017). The increasing use of the Internet and the growth in crowdfunding vehicles give rise to more increasing estimates of this share for the years to come. While it seems intuitive that sharing online crowdfunding campaigns on social media increases donations, since more people get to know about them, the net effect of such sharing has not been studied. In Essay 1, using data scraped from a major crowdfunding website, it is shown that sharing crowdfunded campaigns on social media actually has a negative effect on donations. This is a phenomenon which, in recent literature, has come to be known as slacktivism; the tendency of people to make fast, easy contributions (e.g., sharing a campaign, wearing a bracelet to support a cause, etc.) instead of meaningful, perhaps more difficult contribution (e.g., actually giving money to a cause). It is further shown that consistent with similar online social living (non-donation) campaigns (e.g., Groupon), there is a 'critical mass' beyond which donations increase significantly. The existence of these phenomena in the nonprofit domain has important strategic implications about how awareness is to be made about nonprofit campaigns in the online world. Building up upon the implications of Essay 1, Essay 2 uses propensity-score matching (PSM) to compare and contrast the success factors of campaigns that are shared both on the social media and traditional media vis-à-vis those that are merely shared on the social media. Using data scraped from a major crowdfunding website, average treatment effect (ATE) is estimated for various success factors. This research is the first of its kind to measure treatment effects in the online crowdfunding of charitable donations. Further, the literature on this topic does not offer a concrete prediction as to which means of promotion might have a superior effect. This research has important implications for using social media as a promotion tool. Finally, Essay 3 investigates donations in the not-exactly-cheerful realm of cadaveric organs for transplantation. Given that the rational decision-making framework has not been significantly successful in explaining and predicting behavior in this domain, a conceptual framework is proposed to study cadaveric organ donations using irrational (illogical) beliefs. This research has important implications for reducing the considerable gap between the current supply and demand of cadaveric organs.

This dissertation is a collection of three essays in the fields of environmental and public economics. The first essay assesses the effect of government spending on charitable donations to environmental causes. Using a theoretical model, I solve for changes in private donations due to increased government spending and contrast this with changes due to direct grants to nonprofit organizations. Depending on the nonprofit's fundraising response, government spending may result in the crowding out or in of private giving. I empirically investigate this topic using data from the tax returns of environmental charities as well as a panel survey data set on the philanthropic behavior of individuals. My results indicate that government expenditures on the environment actually crowd in private giving, partly due to the increased fundraising response by charities. The second essay examines the incidence of a pollution tax scheme in which tax revenue is returned to low-income workers. Using a general equilibrium model with both skilled and unskilled labor, a decomposition of the real net wage effects shows the effect of the tax rebate, the effect on the uses side of income (higher product prices), and the effect on the sources side of income (relative wage rates). Numerical examples show that returning the revenue to the low-skilled workers is still not enough to offset the effect of higher product prices; in almost all cases, the rebate does not prevent a reduction in the real net wage. The third essay studies the distributional effects of the SO2 allowance market. Even if low-income households do not have large budget shares for the polluting good, grandfathered permit systems may still be regressive since the permit rents accrue disproportionately to wealthy shareholders in the polluting industry. I estimate the burden imposed on different income groups under a grandfathered permit policy and compare this with the burden under an auctioned policy. Using Monte Carlo techniques, I calculate the 5th and 95th percentiles of the distribution of possible results. I find evidence of regressivity for grandfathered permits whereas an emissions tax/auctioned permit system can be progressive if the scarcity rents are distributed in lump sums.

Nonprofit organizations are increasingly resembling private firms in a transformation bringing with it a shift in financial dependence from charitable donation to commercial sales activity. This book, first published in 1998, examines the reasons and consequences of the mimicry of private firms by fundraising nonprofits. User fees and revenue from 'ancillary' activities are mushrooming, with each having important side effects: pricing out of the market certain target groups; or distracting the nonprofit from its central mission. The authors focus first on issues that apply to nonprofits generally: the role of competition, analysis of nonprofit organization behavior, the effects of distribution goals and differential taxation of nonprofit and for-profit activity revenue, the effects of changes in donations on commercial activity, and conversions of nonprofits to for-profits. They then turn to specific industries: hospitals, universities, social service providers, zoos, museums, and public broadcasting. The book concludes with recommendations for research and for public policy toward nonprofits.

The arts and humanities are considered to be a core academic subject under federal law. This designation grants these education programs the right to federal funds; however, budget propositions do not allot the arts sufficient financial resources. Funding Challenges and Successes in Arts Education is a timely research publication featuring the most recent scholarly information on fiscal changes that support the financing of the humanities in national and international education. Including extensive coverage on a number of topics and perspectives such as strategic planning, school reform, and teacher training, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, teachers, and administrators seeking current research on innovative ways to fund the arts.

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A wide-ranging survey of the theory and evidence on public goods, presenting the main literature on public goods, both theoretical and empirical, in a systematic manner. The breadth and depth of the book's coverage extends the existing literature in many ways.