Charitable Donation Behavior, Payment Modes, and the Covid-19 Pandemic : A Lab Experiment

We investigate how payment modes influenced charitable giving behaviors before and after the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in a laboratory experiment. In a real donation game, subjects use cash or contactless mobile payment to make real donations. We showed that contactless mobile payments induced more donations than cash after the lockdown, while no difference was found before the lockdown. We argue that familiarity with a payment mode is crucial in explaining the effect. Lockdown during the pandemic familiarized people with the contactless mobile payments, leading to larger donations via mobile payment than cash