Charitable Giving under Normative Uncertainty : Experimental Evidence on The Behavioral Impact of Normative Expert Advice

When giving to one charity, individuals face two types of uncertainty, descriptive and normative. We report a between-subjects charitable-giving experiment which provides first data on normative uncertainty (n=1890). In our experiment, participants can bid for either descriptive information, expert advice, or both, via a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism. They can donate to one of five charities. First, we find participants are willing to pay a higher amount for descriptive information than for expert advice. Second, the data show that both information and expert advice, if randomly provided, impact charity choice, but not donation size. This also leads to a reduction in uncertainty. Third, if participants receive information or advice that they paid for, they are both more likely to change choice of charity and increase their donations compared to those who received it for free. These results suggest that randomly selected expert advice can guide behavior and reduce self-reported uncertainty