Donating to charity requires time, effort and attention. If the nuisance costs to give are perceived to be large, charities may lose out on donations. We develop a non-parametric test for the presence of these costs and conduct a large-scale field experiment on giving to show that nuisance costs...

Friends can influence many aspects of one's life, including giving behavior. Using data on 10,000 donors from a field experiment with an online giving community, we examine the effectiveness and underlying motivations for donors to ask friends via social media to give to a charity. Asking a...

At its core, this dissertation examines the role of information, particularly as it relates to proxies for quality, and how it affects both donor and organization decision processes in the humanitarian space. In Chapter 2 I consider the context of competition within the sub-sector of...

Two main reasons why people donate to charity are that they have been asked and asked by someone they care about. One would therefore expect that charitable organizations could benefit from peer-to-peer fundraising if they were able to persuade donors to do so for them. However, little is known...