Self-Signaling and Prosocial Behavior: a Cause Marketing Mobile Field Experiment /
We empirically test an information economics based theory of social preferences in which ego utility and self-signaling can potentially crowd out the effect of consumption utility on choices. Two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments involving a consumer good and charitable donations...
Gespeichert in:
- Weitere Titel:
- Self-Signaling and Prosocial Behavior
- 1. Verfasser:
- Körperschaft:
- Weitere Verfasser:
- ,
- Format:
- Elektronisch E-Book
- Sprache:
- Englisch
- Veröffentlicht:
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Cambridge, Mass.
National Bureau of Economic Research
2015.
- Zusammenfassung:
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We empirically test an information economics based theory of social preferences in which ego utility and self-signaling can potentially crowd out the effect of consumption utility on choices. Two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments involving a consumer good and charitable donations are conducted using a subject pool of actual consumers. We find that bundling relatively large charitable donations with a consumer good can generate non-monotonic regions of demand. Consumers also self-report significantly lower ratings of "feeling good about themselves" when a large donation is bundled with a large price discount for the good. The combined evidence supports the self-signaling theory whereby price discounts crowd out a consumer's self-inference of altruism from buying a good bundled with a charitable donation. Alternative theories of motivation crowding are unable to fit the non-monotonic moments in the data. A structural model of self-signaling is fit to the data to quantify the economic magnitude of ego utility and its role in driving consumer decisions.
- Umfang:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Anmerkungen:
- August 2015.
- Schlagworte:
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