Giving as a self-control problem

Social preferences depend on emotional states like compassion and anger. Since emotions are fleeting and subject to manipulation, they may generate demand for commitment. We investigate the use of commitment strategies in an online experiment (n = 1, 400), where subjects decide to watch or avoid videos before engaging in a charitable giving task. We find that a video with emotional content increases giving, but is also avoided more than non-emotional videos. We estimate a structural model of state-dependent social preferences, and show evidence for sophisticated commitment to selfishness and altruism. We argue that giving can be fruitfully analyzed as a self-control problem.