Many Americans hold erroneous beliefs regarding the level of inequality in the United States and the efforts the federal government makes to alleviate poverty. In general, they overestimate the extent of poverty relief undertaken by government. Given that poverty relief programs are a public...

Giving (warm-glow plus purely altruistic giving) in the dictator game has been shown to vary with the nature of the endowment (house versus earned money), the action set (giving only versus the option to take), and the type of recipient (anonymous participants versus a charity). The contribution...

We report the results of a real-donation experiment in which we test the effect on giving to charity of tangible and intangible house and earned money. We also expand the action set, allowing our participants to take from, as well as give to, their charities. In our intangible treatments, the...

Some problems are more easily solved if context is provided. A stylized result from beauty contest experiments is that most choices are consistent with level-1 or level-2 thinking rather than the Nash equilibrium. The beauty contest experiment reported in this paper includes treatments in which...

One criticism of the dictator experiment is that the decision task is contrived with no equivalent counterpart in the field. This note discusses two types of giving that receive media attention but are not discussed in the economics literature. The Secret Santas walk around shopping centers and...

This paper reports an experimental investigation of a trust game using either cash or class credit as incentives to participants. We recruit from two auditorium classes. In one class, each token has cash value; in the other, each token is worth extra-credit points added to the students' overall...

We examine why individuals voluntarily donate to both private charities and government organizations. We study a “giving to the government” real donation experiment in which each participant allocates money between herself and a charitable organization. The function of the charities are...

We re-analyse participant behaviour in standard economics experiments studying voluntary contributions to a public good. Previous approaches were based in part on a priori models of decision-making, such as maximising personal earnings, or reciprocating the behaviour of others. Many participants...

We report the results of a laboratory experiment on crowd-out in a voluntary contribution mechanism public good game. In our setting, a standard argument states that a tax should not be effective in raising contributions, because agents respond by reducing voluntary contributions by the amount...