Signaling Virtue : Charitable Behavior Under Consumer Elective Pricing

Four field experiments examined the quantitative and qualitative forces influencing behaviors under consumer elective pricing called “shared social responsibility” (SSR, Gneezy, Gneezy, Nelson, & Brown, 2010). Under SSR consumers can pay what they want and a percentage of their payment goes to support a charitable cause. Customers in our experiments were sensitive to the presence of charitable giving, paying more when a portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1-4), but were largely insensitive to what portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1 and 2). To test possible explanations we examined how consumers’ qualitative concerns to signal a positive image influenced their decisions and found that neither self-selection into paying (Studies 3 and 4) nor social pressure (Study 4) explained higher payments under SSR