Prior work has demonstrated that prosocial incentives - where individuals' effort benefits a charitable organization - can be more effective than standard incentives, particularly when the stakes are low. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of prosocial incentives on people's decisions...

People exploit flexibility in mental accounting to relax psychological constraints on spending. Four studies demonstrate this in the context of moral behavior. The first study replicates prior findings that people donate more money to charity when they earned it through unethical versus ethical...

We study whether using prosocial incentives, where effort is tied directly to charitable contributions, may lead to better performance than standard incentive schemes. In a real-effort task, individuals indeed work harder for charity than for themselves, but only when incentive stakes are low....